{"id":4,"date":"2007-11-23T07:55:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-23T15:55:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/2007\/11\/23\/china-based-video-sharing-youku-takes-25-million-totals-40m\/"},"modified":"2007-11-24T03:11:39","modified_gmt":"2007-11-24T11:11:39","slug":"china-based-video-sharing-youku-takes-25-million-totals-40m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/2007\/11\/23\/china-based-video-sharing-youku-takes-25-million-totals-40m\/","title":{"rendered":"China-based video-sharing Youku takes $25 million, totals $40M"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\">                  <!--  .style1 {font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif}  --><\/style>\n<p class=\"style1\">In its the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedwords.com\/business\/industrial-branches\/financial-services\/venture-capital-services\/venture-capital\/third_round_of_funding.php\">third round of funding<\/a> for the company Youku raised $25 million which is pretty large amount\u00c2\u00a0for a China based web site. We remember large scale funding happened before for a couple of other China Internet companies one of which is Maxthon, the China based browser organized as donateware (part of Charles River Venture&#8217;s portfolio). Brookside Capital Partners, a subsidiary of Ban Capital, led the round with previous investors Sutter Hill Ventures, Farraloon Capital Management and Chengwei Ventures also participating. Youku&#8217;s previous two rounds were for $3 million and $12 million, giving the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linkedwords.com\/computers\/multimedia\/online-entertainment\/movies\/video\/video-sharing.php\">video-sharing<\/a> site a total of $40 million in funding to date.<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.youku.com\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" vspace=\"5\" align=\"left\" width=\"187\" src=\"http:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/i\/youkulogo.png\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"40\" \/>Youku.com<\/a> is a rapidly growing Chinese YouTube-style video sharing site. It is one of the larger Chinese video sites, with more than 70 million video plays a day <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pacificepoch.com\/newsstories\/110693_0_5_0_M\/\">according to Pacific Epoch<\/a>. Youku also has a lot of big-time connections. Victor Koo, the chief executive of Youku, used to be the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.danwei.org\/china_businesscast_models_for.php\">chief executive of Sohu<\/a>, and the two companies have a business relationship. Farallon Capital, the hedge fund, led an initial round of $3 million in March 2006. Bain Capital venture subsidiary Brookside Capital Partners\u00c2\u00a0led this latest round, with other investors including Chengwei Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. Also the\u00c2\u00a0well-known Sutter Hill partner Len Baker <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sutterhillventures.com\/team\/baker.html\">is on Youku&#8217;s board<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">The investment money is said to be used towards infrastructure and operations, according to the company. There is a belief that part of the money will go for improving the copyright protection methods, which for a country like China are more than important. Google&#8217;s YouTube is also heading towards the Chinese market trying to increase its market share there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">The site was hard to open from outside China.<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">In other news Sohu.com Inc. (Nasdaq: SOHU), China&#8217;s leading online media, communications and search company and Youku.com, China&#8217;s leading online video website, <a href=\"http:\/\/news.websitegear.com\/view\/25115\">announced<\/a> today that they entered into strategic cooperation to jointly foster the development of the online video industry in China and to promote video-based citizen journalism and user generated content among Chinese online users.<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">[ via <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2007\/11\/21\/youku-funded\/\">Mashable<\/a> ]<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">[ via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paidcontent.org\/entry\/419-chinese-video-sharing-site-youku-raises-25-million-third-round\/\">Paidcontent<\/a> ]<\/p>\n<p class=\"style1\">[ via <a href=\"http:\/\/venturebeat.com\/2007\/11\/21\/china-roundup-youku-facebook-and-qunar\/%20\">Venturebeat<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In its the third round of funding for the company Youku raised $25 million which is pretty large amount\u00c2\u00a0for a China based web site. We remember large scale funding happened before for a couple of other China Internet companies one of which is Maxthon, the China based browser organized as donateware (part of Charles River [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16,15,3,17],"tags":[1376,1375,1377,20,19],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ban-capital","category-brookside-capital-partners","category-charles-river-venture","category-funding","category-sutter-hill-ventures","tag-brookside-capital-partners","tag-charles-river-venture","tag-sutter-hill-ventures","tag-video-sharing","tag-youku"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web2innovations.com\/money\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}