Hudong, China’s Wikipedia, Raises $50 Million in Funding

Hudong is China’s massive, crowd-sourced encyclopedic wiki – with 6.4 million articles to date – which is run as a for-profit company. And now it has more cash to play with after raising $50 million in third-round funding.

CNN’s Term Sheet blog reveals that the new Hudong investment round is being raised in part via Xpert Financial, the electronic trading platform that allows companies to raise capital while maintaining independence and perhaps avoid having to IPO.

Xpert’s chairman, Tim Draper, has been encouraging his circle of VC contacts to back Hudong by teling them via email:

Hudong is China’s leading for-profit social knowledge platform – a wiki-enabled encyclopedia that monetizes its content through advertising. China is one of the largest and fastest growing internet and mobile markets in the world.

DFJ Dragon has invested in the Series A, B, and B-1 offerings, [and] I have personally invested in the B and B-1 offerings — as have other leading venture capital firms — and we intend to participate in the Series C offering. I would urge you to consider this opportunity.

Indeed, Hudong has previously raised over $45 million from DFJ Dragon, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Northern Light Venture Capital. It seems DFJ Dragon is participating in this newest round, but it’s not yet clear if Northern Light joined in again.

Just a few days ago, Hudong announced that it has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to help improve Bing’s Chinese search results from its own knowledge-base.

[Source: CNN]