It’s a Deal! FTuan Snags $60 Million in Funding, Kaixin Partnership

FTuan CEO Lin Ning (left) with Kaixin CEO Cheng Bing-hao, at FTuan HQ. (Image source: QQ Tech news)

Chinese group buy site FTuan has confirmed, by way of its CEO, Lin Ning, that it has secured US$60 million in third-round funding. With 2,000 employees, Mr Lin states that FTuan has the cash to be sustainable for two or three years. Plus, the company has one more round of financing in the pipeline.

It has also been revealed that FTuan is powering the new Kaixin Tuan deals site that we looked at recently. It’s a partnership that sees FTuan effectively operating the Kaixin Tuan platform (pictured below), as well as being one of the many other group buy sites to coordinate some deals with Kaixin.

The Kaixin Tuan site that is operated by FTuan.

The FTuan and Kaixin partnership will soon go further, into – to quote QQ Tech News – a sort of “social e-commerce” platform. Kaixin is a SNS and social gaming platform, so that plan sounds like an interesting fusion of each company’s speciality. No other details are yet available on that.

Back in July of this year, Tencent (HKG:0700) was one of the investors in FTuan’s second round of funding. It was never disclosed just how much the giant web portal injected into the group buy site. Tencent is Groupon’s official joint-venture partner in China, but it has been hedging its bets with its own QQ Tuan, as well as the FTuan investment.

In the cut-throat group buy sector in China, it seems to be a case of tie-up or die-off, as a few key players emerge and build up a kind of gravity that takes people away from smaller deals sites. The last time we looked at statistics relating to offered/sold deals and revenue in this sector, FTuan was a top ten competitor.

[Source: QQ Tech news – article in Chinese]