"Gaoding" Secures Several Million USD in Pre-A Funding from FreeS Fund and Baidu Ventures | FreeS Fund Investment News
Building a company's "cloud-based marketing department."
Recently, digital marketing services crowdsourcing platform "Gaoding" announced the completion of a multi-million-dollar Pre-A funding round jointly invested by FreeS Fund and Baidu Ventures.
Businesses are paying increasing attention to digital marketing, yet finding cost-effective marketing service providers has remained a persistent pain point. Gaoding aggregates marketing service resources, screens quality marketing talent, facilitates communication between clients and vendors, and ensures quality through standardized processes.
Li Dong, CEO of Gaoding, said the company's monthly GMV exceeded 2 million RMB in Q2, doubling quarter-over-quarter. Currently, creative marketing (copywriting, posters, etc.) accounts for roughly 40% of platform orders, while integrated marketing (content plus distribution channel packages) makes up about 60%.
What the Investors Say
Huang Hai, Vice President at FreeS Fund
Email: hai@freesvc.com
In the process of consumption upgrading, beyond the upgrading of distribution channels and brands, marketing methods are also evolving. We started with offline advertising, moved to search engine ads in the internet era, and in recent years have shifted toward user acquisition through social media.
Today, companies riding the consumption upgrade wave need marketing approaches better suited to new-era consumers — winning their affection through superior content and more socially engaging marketing, rather than simply buying search engine placements as before. Quality marketing has thus become crucial for consumer companies across all industries.
Yet SMEs struggle to hire large international marketing agencies, which prefer serving bigger enterprises. Building in-house marketing teams, meanwhile, may not be cost-effective for SMEs, and turnover tends to be high.
So in this era of consumption upgrading, SMEs need reliable outsourcing partners to solve their core marketing challenges. Gaoding is a service provider that offers internet-based marketing management for SMEs. It uses internet-native methods to improve service efficiency and management efficiency throughout the marketing outsourcing process. The founding team brings over ten years of experience in marketing, having served well-known companies including Procter & Gamble and Lenovo.
FreeS Fund firmly believes in startups like Gaoding that use the internet to improve service efficiency. Earlier, FreeS-backed instant image sharing platform VPhoto has also grown rapidly since its founding.
"Precision Digital Marketing" for SMEs: Gaoding Raises Multi-Million-Dollar Pre-A Round
Source: 36Kr
Digital marketing services crowdsourcing platform Gaoding recently announced a multi-million-dollar Pre-A funding round jointly led by FreeS Fund and Baidu Ventures, following an angel round from GGV Capital and Tianshan Capital.
In China, the marketing services industry employs nearly 4 million people and continues to grow rapidly, with digital marketing becoming essential for businesses. Two main factors drive this: first, the digitization of media has transformed marketing methods and advertising channels; second, the constant emergence of new brands and products, combined with companies' growing emphasis on market and brand building, has created significant opportunities for the marketing industry. Yet the sector also faces several problems:
First, with abundant media resources and fragmented content channels, SMEs have limited bandwidth to efficiently connect with quality marketing service providers.
Second, top-tier marketing resources are concentrated in large agencies (such as 4A firms), with inflated pricing.
In short, across e-commerce, new retail, content entrepreneurship, and other sectors, companies increasingly value digital marketing, but finding cost-effective service providers remains a pain point. This is where platforms like Gaoding demonstrate their value — aggregating marketing resources, screening quality talent, connecting clients with vendors, and ensuring quality through standardized processes.
First, Gaoding addresses information asymmetry in a segmented market. CEO Li Dong notes the platform currently has 100 enterprise clients and 1,000 registered creators, with direct communication between parties and transparent pricing.
During registration, clients follow intelligent interactive prompts to fill out requirements using SOP options across different domains like copywriting, promotion, and design. Gaoding believes poor communication between clients and vendors is a key reason marketing planning becomes inefficient, and that SOPs can help both sides quickly align on needs.
Second, the platform has a marketing consultant team of over ten people, each with 3–5 years of industry experience. Consultants work one-on-one with clients to refine briefs and match them with designers, copywriters, or integrated marketing specialists, narrowing options to 1–3 creators for the client to choose from.
Whether SOPs and consultants can truly solve communication efficiency issues remains an open question. This is fundamentally a problem of industry knowledge gaps, and the effective solution is typically long-term partnership with a stable marketing vendor — the kind of sustained collaboration that builds mutual understanding. This explains why many SMEs still prefer traditional offline marketing agencies; they value physical presence, stability, and deep familiarity with their partners.
Another important feature on the Gaoding platform is data retention and archiving. From consultation through execution, the entire process is recorded with online data available for tracing. Gaoding aims to help clients build a "cloud-based marketing department" — compared to simple, traditional business-matching platforms, it provides online marketing project management services including data accumulation and execution feedback. For SMEs with high marketing staff turnover, this may prove more valuable than any single cost-effective campaign. Li Dong said that through predictive data analytics, the platform could eventually reduce client trial-and-error costs by 70%.
Moving from a marketing matching platform to an intelligent digital marketing services platform, Gaoding's most critical challenges remain improving its intelligent interactive system, data volume, and data capture and analysis capabilities. The former requires technical advancement; the latter depends on acquiring more users and accumulating sufficient industry data — without enough data volume, extracting practically useful insights becomes difficult.
On profitability, Li Dong said 70% of each order's price goes to fulfillment costs, with 30% as platform gross margin. Q2 monthly GMV exceeded 2 million RMB, doubling quarter-over-quarter. Creative marketing (copywriting, posters, etc.) accounts for roughly 40% of orders, while integrated marketing (content plus distribution channel packages) makes up about 60%.
For marketing platforms, media channel resources represent a key competitive advantage. Creative success may be unpredictable, but channel resource combinations deliver exposure that is foreseeable and controllable (traffic fraud notwithstanding). This makes team background particularly important. Gaoding's team of 40-plus people has core members with years of digital marketing experience. CEO Li Dong previously worked at Social Touch, overseeing SME business; CTO Zhu Jianxin previously led R&D management for Weibo's core products; Chairman and angel investor Zhang Rui is founder of Social Touch.
