Who in Silicon Valley has funding from Tencent? Here’s a list of the Chinese tech giant’s US investments

Chinese consumer tech firm Tencent has its feet in many different parts of the Chinese internet – including games, messaging apps, payments, ecommerce, social networking, and cloud storage. But while the company dominates China’s online infrastructure, it’s traditionally kept a relatively low profile abroad.

Over the past two years, however, Tencent has ramped up its investments in Silicon Valley-based internet companies. Coinciding with its aggressive campaign to turn the mobile messenger WeChat into China’s first homegrown global hit, the company has contributed to funding rounds for some of California’s most high-profile startups.

Looking at Tencent’s investment portfolio, we can’t really decisively extrapolate an encompassing theme among the firms it has funded. Regardless, the company has staff members in Palo Alto and New York City, so it seems quite likely that as the company ramps up its international ambitions, the US-based team will do a lot of the research and meet-and-greets prior to making a bet.

See: Here’s our roundup of Alibaba’s investments in US-based companies

Below we’ve listed Tencent’s largest funding rounds for US-based, consumer internet companies. It’s worth noting that Tencent has only led one of these six rounds, so we’re doing some fun speculation over what might ultimately end up as charity bids.

Snapchat

The most high-profile bet from the Chinese company, Tencent’s investment in Snapchat was finally confirmed last November after months of media speculation. TechCrunch reported that Tencent served as a minority investor in a US$60 million round led by Institutional Venture Partners, which quelled any suspicions that the Chinese company was digging extra deep into its pockets for Spiegel and crew.

While the Tencent-Snapchat connection might not run very deep financially, if Evan Spiegel and Marc Andreessen are to be trusted, it runs deep spiritually. Spiegel has name dropped the company on several occasions, and even referred to it as a “role model” in regard to its future plans for monetization at TechCrunch Disrupt.

Monetization is a great topic and one we think a lot about because we are a business. The way we think about monetization has changed a lot. We look to one of our role models which is Tencent, which is a really big company in China. They make the vast majority of their revenues from in-app transactions. What’s fascinating about that is when Tencent really had to make money, there wasn’t huge brand advertising market. So they couldn’t just say “here’s this bucket of billions of dollars, we’re gonna take five percent of it and be a big company.” They had to build things that people wanted to buy. I think that’s a scary challenge – to sit at a board meeting and say ‘rather than take 5 percent of these billions of dollars of display ads, we’re going to make stuff that people want. I think we’re fortunate to have really great long-term investors that believe in our ability to do that.

Last January, Marc Andreessen, the unofficial seer of the valley, described Tencent’s legacy as the “bull case” for Snapchat.

Weebly

Cyanogen Inc

Fab

Whisper

Plain Vanilla

Bonus: Sowing Seeds