BaiChangHui Closes RMB 70 Million Series B Round, FreeS Fund Continues to Follow On | Funding News
Behind BaiChangHui's growth lies consumer demand for personalized venues.
On October 11, 2017, Baichanghui, a company focused on providing offline event venues and activity solutions, announced its Series B funding round. The round was led by Kaixin Investment, Zhaopin founder Hao Liu, and other institutions and individuals. Previous investor FreeS Fund continued to participate.
According to Baichanghui co-founder and CEO Wei Shen, the company raised RMB 70 million in this round, which will be used to help venue owners grow and promote standardization and scaling in the industry. To date, Baichanghui has raised over RMB 100 million in total funding.
Investor Perspective
Hai Huang, Vice President, FreeS Fund
Email: hai@freesvc.com
From a business standpoint, two forces are driving Baichanghui's growth.
First, younger consumers are changing how they gather socially. Compared with the somewhat dull routine of restaurant dinners and traditional KTV sessions, young people today increasingly seek out more interesting, personalized ways to spend time together. Amid the consumption upgrade trend, the distinctive venues that Baichanghui offers better satisfy young consumers' diverse and individualized social needs.
Second, businesses themselves are trending toward smaller scale, as evidenced by the rise of co-working spaces. Unlike larger corporations that prefer hosting press conferences and meetings at star-rated hotels, small and medium-sized enterprises tend toward more personalized options when they need event space.
Consumers want personalized venues, and from a team capability perspective, we believe Baichanghui can meet that demand well. Co-founder and CEO Wei Shen and his core team previously served as executives at eLong. Their experience battling through the red ocean of China's online travel agency sector equips them to help Baichanghui stand out in the offline event venue space — a model similar to OTAs, but with far gentler competition.
Event Venues: An Offline Trend with Built-In Traffic
Baichanghui is a booking platform for distinctive event venues, aggregating over 100,000 offline spaces across categories including party houses, villas, meeting spaces, cafés, creative venues, and boutique hotels.
Starting in the first half of 2017, Baichanghui began exploring more packaged services based on user scenarios, and the business has since seen explosive growth. Its team-building services for corporate users, in particular, have maintained month-over-month growth above 50%.
At a time when party gatherings, corporate training and team-building events, and offline salons have become a popular lifestyle and genuine necessity, Baichanghui's "venue plus scenario" approach effectively serves the needs of both consumer and business users.
Baichanghui has become the clear leader in the event venue segment. According to figures released at the press conference, the platform currently has 1.05 million registered users and over 400,000 monthly active users. In the past two years, it has served 120,000 private gatherings among family and friends and 80,000 company events, with notable corporate clients including Amazon, Baidu, Xiaomi, DiDi, KPMG, Babytree, and Mobike.
On this, FreeS Fund founding partner Feng Li said: "We continued to participate in this round because we strongly believe in Baichanghui's ability to extend offline. Today, the entire mobile internet is facing a traffic shortage, while event scenarios that generate their own traffic through the combination of online and offline are well suited to future needs and changes."
"Furious Bloom" Program: Opening Up Offline Scenarios with Commercial Partners
In recent years, rich offline scenarios have become a scarce resource. Physical stores have become essential touchpoints for brands to reach users for the first time and to re-engage them through quality experiences, prompting many companies to rebuild their offline presence. Yet opening stores is no simple matter — each location covers a limited catchment area, and the ongoing costs of rent, renovation, and staff salaries make long-term operations challenging.
To address this, Baichanghui launched its "Furious Bloom" ecosystem partner program, aiming to share offline venue traffic with partners while offering venue operators more services.
The first batch of partners in the "Furious Bloom" program includes MaxHub, a product under listed company CVTE, as well as V.Photos, AlgorithmArt Lab, and Haowu. Baichanghui will match these partners with the most suitable offline scenarios and target audiences, designing bespoke scenario-based marketing approaches.
"For these companies, they don't need to operate a storefront — the offline scenarios where their target audiences already gather naturally become their stores," said Shen. "On the other side, ecosystem partners expand the range of services that venue owners can offer, giving users access to more content, ultimately creating wins for businesses, venue operators, and consumers alike."
Competitive Moat: Quality Experience Built on Technology
Offline scenario transactions carry substantial technical and commercial barriers. Two years of exploration and accumulation have given Baichanghui the ability to precisely cover various consumer segments.
According to Baichanghui co-founder and CTO Ruiqing Zhu, the company has developed an operations system codenamed "Pangu" that connects user demand with venue information, precisely matching user needs and using the platform's massive data to make more accurate judgments about customers. This has truly integrated online and offline data, forming a medium-term competitive advantage.
Zhu previously served as Vice President at eLong and Technical Director at Amazon (US). He said: "As our understanding of venues deepens, the definitional dimensions that Baichanghui has established for 'venues' exceed those for most products at Amazon." Baichanghui has already taken the lead in informatizing, structuring, and standardizing 80,000 venues, making venue booking — a relatively complex and non-standardized transaction scenario — actually workable.
Baichanghui has also independently developed a SaaS tool called "Huizhang" for venue owners' daily information management, supporting functions including order acceptance and bidding, schedule management, order management, payment processing, customer CRM, and venue information management. This helps venue owners dramatically improve operational efficiency through digital tools, earning strong word-of-mouth among this vertical segment of venue operators.
Over the past two years, Baichanghui has generated over RMB 250 million in revenue for venue operators. The company's own revenue comes primarily from commissions and advertising, with commissions at 80% and advertising at 20%, and it has already achieved revenue balance.
