Latest Deals Featuring Wanda, GrabTaxi Show Asia To US Trend
Leading global PE fund SAIF has led a Series A round of Care24, a Mumbai-based healthcare startup. India Quotient, Care24’s seed investor, joined the round by providing follow-on investment less than three months after its initial funding. The one-year-old startup claims 3000 patients on its platform and 350-400 daily visits to patients’ homes, provided by 500 caregivers. The startup plans use the cash to consolidate its presence in Mumbai and to expand to more cities.
The funding is the latest in India’s growing home healthcare sector, which is seeing other startups such as Portea (which raised $38 million from investors including Accel Partners), India Home Healthcare and others scale up. These companies aim to address the growing $2.5 billion market of more than 100 million Indians aged 60 and over, which is expected to triple by 2050. Care24 claims that almost 80% of its business is from elderly home care-giving.
Silicon Valley-based security software provider Shape Security has closed a $25 million Series D as it prepares to expand into China. The round was led by Baseline Ventures, Epic Ventures and Beijing-based Northern Light Venture Capital, and brings the five-year-old startup’s total funding to $91 million.
China continues its investment in Hollywood with conglomerate Dalian Wanda Group‘s deal to buy film studio Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion. According to Dealogic, this is the fourth-largest Chinese investment in the U.S. The new ownership will see Wanda support Legendary’s expansion in China, where a growing urban middle class is fueling a booming movie industry.
Wanda’s previous acquisitions include AMC, North America’s second largest theater chain, bought for $2.6 billion in 2012.
Chinese video sharing site Acfun snagged $60 million in an extended Series A round from SoftBank China, following a $50 million Series A from domestic video titan Youku Tudou in August 2015. Founded in 2007, Acfun is popular with young Chinese who especially enjoy the video site’s “bullet screen” function, which allows viewers to comment on films and games by sending text messages.
In an illustration of the increasing trend of overseas companies hiring on U.S. soil, GrabTaxi is opening its first U.S. office in Seattle. The ride-hailing company intends for the center to focus on engineering, complementing the work done by teams at its Singapore- and Beijing- based R&D centers. The startup claims that its app boasts more than 10 million downloads to-date, along with up to 1.5 million bookings each day.
– digest by Ying-Ying Lu
