Qualcomm Leads Series C Funding into a Chinese Online English Education Startup

With a claimed 10 million registered users right now, Chinese online education company Alo7 has wrapped up a third major round of funding. The sum is the usually vague eight-digit figure, so it could be anywhere north of $10 million. The lead investor is American chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), with participation from UMC Capital and Vickers Venture.

Aside from having lots of Chinese parents paying up for Alo7’s online courses, the well-established Shanghai-based startup also has partnerships with hundreds of English language training academies, public elementary schools, and kindergartens across China. Clients include the troubled New Oriental (NYSE:EDU) chain of language schools.

(See: Are Chinese Schools Beating the US in Technology Integration? [Infographic])

Alo7 was started up in 2010, but the parent company Saybot, which makes learning-oriented voice recognition software, has been around since 2004. It was founded in Boston, US, in 2004 by MIT graduate Dr. Pengkai Pan. After some initial support and seed funding from architect and MIT luminary Nicholas Negroponte (founder of the One Laptop per Child Association), the educational startup moved back to mainland China to target the huge demand for English language learning there. The entire ‘English as a foreign language’ (EFL) market in China is said to be worth over $2 billion – and inevitably more of that is going to move online.

The first funding round for Alo7’s parent company was worth $8.2 million back in 2007, led by CID Group.

(Hat-tip to Sina Tech (article in Chinese) and Marbridge Daily for spotting this)