‘Xiaomi is now worth $10 billion,’ confirms CEO Lei Jun after new funding round

Titans of industry: Kingsoft, YY, and Xiaomi execs celebrating the finalized deal.

Last June, Chinese mobile startup Xiaomi had netted an additional $216 million in series C funding that gave the company an effective valuation of around $4 billion. Now, just a little over a year later, Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun has confirmed via his Sina Weibo account that the company has brought in another round of funding that raises the company’s valuation to a staggering $10 billion.

That’s about all we have for details at the moment; co-founder Li Moqiang has said that more details will be released on September 5, which is the day of Xiaomi’s upcoming press event. But the $10 billion valuation is definitely a fact, as it was confirmed both by Lei Jun in his original comment and by Mr. Li in the comments.

We’ve contacted Xiaomi for comment and will update this post if we hear back. In the interim, it’s worth noting that there was speculation last month that Xiaomi and Tencent were just partnering for the Redmi phone and that Tencent was planning to make a massive investment in the mobile company. Whether or not that actually happened hasn’t been confirmed, but I’d say that Tencent is probably in the number one slot in terms of likely sources for this latest round of financing.

(Source: TechWeb)