Bloks Group Closes RMB 330 Million Series A Round to Accelerate Building a "World-Class Children's Brand Made in China"
Building out a "full-scenario" children's industry ecosystem, with deep roots in the children's growth and development track.
Recently, Shanghai Bloks Tech Group Co., Ltd. announced the completion of its Series A funding round. The round raised RMB 330 million, with Gaorong Ventures participating as an investor.
Bloks, whose corporate mission is "technology accompanies growth," was founded in 2014. The company is dedicated to using innovative technology to comprehensively upgrade children's play and learning scenarios, creating new ways for the next generation to grow, and supporting child development. Bloks Group founder and CEO Weisong Zhu noted, "We chose 'building blocks' as the foundation and core connection of Bloks Group's business, using blocks as the trigger point and primary carrier. Combined with the essential and inevitable stages and scenarios in children's growth, we've built a complete 'blocks+' children's industry ecosystem encompassing toys, animation, games, and education."
After years of deepening operations in product R&D, channel expansion, and marketing, Bloks Group has become a leading domestic enterprise in the children's technology industry. This funding round will primarily be used to continue driving the brand upgrade of Bloks building blocks under the group, as well as deepening market and channel expansion. It will also support the further development of other business segments under the group, such as digital content, B2B education, original animation production and distribution, accelerating Bloks Group's upgrade in the "children + technology" track and advancing toward its corporate vision of becoming "a world-class children's brand made in China."
Redefining Children's Building Blocks
Toys are an indispensable product category in children's growth, and building blocks—combining both play and educational attributes—are among the most classic, innovative, and imaginative forms of children's toys, widely considered the best choice for accompanying children's healthy and happy development. During market research, Bloks discovered that Chinese parents struggled to find building block brands and toys truly suitable for their children's age. The Bloks team identified five "problems" with existing blocks on the market: one-directional construction with outdated play patterns; difficulty in completing models, which undermines confidence; pieces too small, posing swallowing risks; sharp corners that can injure hands; and traditional categories lacking technological innovation.
Bloks is committed to creating "building blocks truly suitable for children's growth" and redefining children's blocks as something that can be built, transformed, and interacted with. To achieve this, Bloks collaborated with top-tier Chinese and international authorities and experts in child psychology, early education, and artificial intelligence to conduct multifaceted research, exploration, and empirical studies. The goal was to develop products that truly align with the developmental characteristics of specific age groups and promote children's physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development.
Today, in Bloks's Global Child Growth Lab, technical professionals continuously analyze usage behavior data from over 600,000 Bloks app users, conduct annual surveys of nearly 10,000 users, and conduct in-depth visits to over 1,200 families to collect and analyze user feedback, gaining deep insights into parent and child needs. Meanwhile, the company maintains rigorous R&D processes, conducting over 16,000 construction tests on instruction manuals and app animations, with each product undergoing repeated testing by 1,000 children before launch... ensuring that every product's block pieces, model combinations, and themed play patterns match children's unique developmental needs.
After six years of development, Bloks has forged its own path of fully independent R&D and original design for domestic building blocks. Multiple authoritative certifications indicate that Bloks building blocks have reached world-class standards in material quality, production processes, in-depth research on children's developmental stages, and the integration of blocks with logic and programming for related competency development. To date, Bloks has accumulated over 400 patents and developed a highly distinctive product form. During the 2020 Tmall Double 11 shopping festival, Bloks defended its title as the top-selling domestic building block brand.
Full-Scenario Industry Layout, Empowering Children's Growth
China's children's consumer goods market is enormous, and under the new domestic brand trend, the prospects for domestic children's brands are broad. Bloks insists on a branding approach, establishing a high-quality, high-standard product industry chain, and gradually integrating block products, animation IP, block games, and education solutions into a watch-play-learn ecosystem that encompasses life, entertainment, and learning scenarios. With blocks as the origin point, Bloks has already laid out a comprehensive children's industry ecosystem: T (Toy) — with the block business at its core, newly upgraded educational and safe block systems that meet children's developmental needs; A (Animation) — original 3D animation continuously mining quality content, strengthening parent-child and entertainment attributes to build more harmonious parent-child relationships; G (Game) — using educational entertainment content as a vehicle, deeply developing quality digital content, and using "Internet+" new technology methods to help children learn happily; E (Education) — based on diversified scenario-based block teaching, outputting quality AI enlightenment education solutions, entering quality elementary schools, kindergartens, and preschool education institutions across China and globally, empowering education.
In the full-scenario children's industry ecosystem that Bloks has built, children can watch Bloks animation for entertainment while learning block construction methods and life knowledge; play with Bloks blocks to exercise imagination, creativity, and hands-on ability; and participate in Bloks online and offline education and various programming competitions to develop learning cognition and technological innovation capabilities for the AI era. By penetrating various scenarios of children's growth, Bloks enables children to broaden their horizons and expand their thinking within its system, growing up healthily and happily. Bloks's block and education products have also won recognition from both B2B and consumer users in overseas markets, selling to 26 countries and regions including the UK, US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and South Korea. "Going forward, we will continue to build the entire group system and product sequence around blocks," noted Weisong Zhu. "We hope to enable more Chinese children to use more scientific, higher-quality products and receive more advanced educational concepts, thereby achieving a comprehensive upgrade of the entire children's industry."
