Innovation Works: Now Incubating 50 Startups, Worth $600+ Million in Total

This month marks the third-year anniversary of Innovation Works, the startup incubator founded and run by the former head of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee. To celebrate the occasion, Kai-Fu has revealed some stats about the group that added a $148 million second fund earlier this year.

The prime stat is that Innovation Works (see its homepage) has backed 50 startup projects so far – which means mentorship and an array of advantages above and beyond just the seed investment. Those 50 young companies are worth an estimated RMB 3.9 billion (US$615.8 million).

A total of 5,000 potential projects were screened before those lucky startups got incubated under the wing of Innovation Works. The accepted ones include the likes of the mobile apps cross-promotions tool Umeng, the company behind the Hotel Finder mobile commerce app, and the third-party Android store and sync service Wandoujia.

As well as seed funding, Innovation Works can also go up to series A investments, and maybe even beyond. It has put in a first round of funding into 18 projects, and one startup got series B backing from the incubator. Almost inevitably, some projects failed: the crash-and-burn tally so far is four.

Its first fund was worth $180 million dollars.

We look forward to seeing more startups leaping into flight from the Innovation Works nest.

[Source: Techweb – article in Chinese]