In China’s red-hot startup scene, even dancing grannies get VC funding

Last week, JD.com CEO Liu Qiangdong said that in China right now, all you need is an idea to get major VC funding. He might just be right. One of the latest (and most unusual) startups to get funding is a mobile app aimed at China’s dancing grannies – the old ladies you see group dancing in supermarket parking lots and parks. Laugh if you want, but the app just pulled in “millions” in RMB (hundreds of thousands of US dollars, at least) from a VC arm of the Wuhan Economic Development Group and a Shenzhen-based VC called The Dreamchaser Fund.

The idea of making an app for dancing grannies reportedly came to young Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Zhiwei after his mother asked him for a way to collect and store videos about how to do various dances. Inspired, Zhang spent a month designing an app with videos of thirty of the hottest dance tunes that works on both Android and iOS. He named the app Public Dance Classics. Within a couple months of release, it had racked up more than 50,000 downloads. Now with some VC funding to back him up, Zhang is turning the made-for-mom app into a proper company.

Up next on the docket is adding social interaction features and promoting the app more widely. Zhang isn’t worried about making money yet. “Until the app has a million users, I won’t think about profits,” he told Chinaventure.cn.

China’s dancing grannies might not be the most obvious target for a tech startup, but there’s no denying the market is massive. The dancing groups meet frequently and are ubiquitous in Chinese cities – in fact, their numbers have become significant enough that the government recently decided to regulate them. Given that there are just 12 government-approved dance routines but Zhang’s app features more than 30, there’s a slight possibility that Zhang’s app could even find itself in a legal gray area. But at least for now, Zhang’s mother and tens of thousands of women like her are enjoying the app’s variety.

(Source: Chinaventure.cn)