Enterprise interactive learning platform UMU announced the completion of a Series C2 financing round worth over 100 million yuan, with 5Y Capital as the investor | 5Y News
Help companies transform performance and productivity through learning.
UMU recently announced it has raised a nine-figure RMB Series C2 round from 5Y Capital. In less than a year, the company has secured investments from institutions including Gaocheng Capital, Hillhouse, and Tencent, completing its Series B, B+, C, and C+ rounds.
Liu Kai, partner at 5Y Capital, said: "At the end of 2015, we had a three-hour deep conversation with UMU founder Dongshuo Li about the future of corporate learning. More than five years have passed, and Li has led UMU to perfectly realize every idea we discussed back then — validated by the market, and executed even better than we had envisioned. UMU is not simply in the business of corporate training. It is helping companies transform performance and productivity through learning, which I believe holds tremendous long-term value and room for growth."
Behind this strong investor interest lies UMU's exceptionally talented team, along with products and services that fit the market precisely and are beloved by Fortune 500 companies. Top talent, leading enterprise clients, and quality investors have created a powerful flywheel effect, allowing UMU's snowball to grow ever larger.
UMU has always adhered to the principle of "people, product, profit" — get the people right, and the right product follows; get the product right, and scalable profit follows. Since its founding, UMU has consistently recruited outstanding talent, ensuring that every exceptional team member achieves great success at UMU, along with significant career development and financial returns. This round of funding will continue to support the ongoing recruitment of top talent.
When excellent people come together, they create compounding returns over time, driving product innovation and leaps forward that win over more leading customers. Grounded in learning science and AI technology, UMU has successfully broken through the bottlenecks of traditional training, connecting every stage of "teach, learn, practice, assess, apply" and bridging the gap from "knowing" to "doing" — using effective learning to improve employee performance and drive organizational development.
AI-driven innovation and applications in corporate learning have delivered substantial benefits for enterprise productivity. UMU recently launched uShow, an intelligent sales training tool that upgrades traditional one-on-one practice feedback to automated, AI-powered simulation training, significantly transforming sales productivity. UMU believes AI can markedly enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and experience of teaching, learning, practice, and application — representing a major opportunity for industry-wide upgrading. UMU will continue investing in AI R&D and application to further lead development and transformation in the global corporate learning space, while continuing to recruit exceptional AI scientists and engineers to put its "people, product, profit" value chain into practice.
To date, UMU's enterprise clients span more than 200 countries and regions globally, with over 70 million users accessing UMU's products and services. Sixty percent of UMU's revenue comes from major international markets including the United States and Japan; leading and high-growth companies in pharmaceuticals, education, retail, manufacturing, finance, and other industries use UMU as their tool and platform for building corporate learning systems and delivering training.
Exceptional talent has produced products that closely match market needs; excellent products have attracted the world's top enterprise clients and driven scalable growth and profit, in turn drawing strong interest from numerous investors. At its founding, UMU received angel and Pre-A round investments from angel investor Gang Wang. Subsequently, UMU gained the backing of investors including TAL Education Group, Xiamen Government Guidance Fund, Gaocheng Capital, Hillhouse, and Tencent. 5Y Capital, the investor in this round, is one of China's earliest venture capital firms focused on early-stage investing and was among the earliest and most persistent backers of innovative internet companies such as Xiaomi and Kuaishou.
Every round of funding has been directed toward continuously recruiting top talent, enhancing product innovation, delivery, and iteration capabilities, and providing more leading enterprises with a one-stop corporate learning delivery platform — thereby driving exponential growth in scale and profit, which in turn provides a strong foundation and support for continued talent recruitment.
UMU's talent, customer, and capital advantages have created a positive feedback loop, generating tremendous flywheel momentum. In Q1 2021, UMU's contract value grew 100% year-over-year, with this rapid growth driven both by numerous leading enterprises adopting UMU as their corporate learning platform and by continued renewals and active upsells from existing clients.
UMU believes that future business competition will ultimately come down to competition for talent, and that corporate learning will evolve beyond training to help companies transform their workforce into talent. In this process, capabilities for managing, reusing, accessing, sharing, and passing on knowledge will become core competitive advantages for enterprises. UMU is committed to making corporate learning performance-driven, helping companies build capabilities for knowledge flow and talent development, and strengthening their core competitiveness.
5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately $5 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe that if the world starts believing in the crazy you that others see, the world will be a better place.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
