Blokees announced the completion of a 330 million RMB Series A funding round, co-led by Source Code Capital and Legend Capital.

源码资本·December 4, 2020·0·2

Moving Toward "A World Children's Brand Made in China"

Blokees has officially announced the completion of its Series A funding round. The Shanghai-based company raised RMB 330 million, led by Source Code Capital and Legend Capital, with participation from select existing shareholders and Gaorong Ventures.

Founded in 2014 with a mission of "technology accompanying growth," Blokees is dedicated to using innovative technology to transform how children play and learn, creating new pathways for childhood development. "We chose building blocks as the foundation and core connector for Blokees' business," explained Weisong Zhu, founder and CEO of Blokees Group. "Using blocks as the entry point and primary medium, combined with essential stages and scenarios in children's development, we've built a complete 'blocks+' children's industry ecosystem spanning toys, animation, games, and education."

Through years of deepening operations in product R&D, channel expansion, and marketing, Blokees has emerged as one of the most closely watched companies in China's children's tech sector. The new funding will primarily support continued brand upgrading for its Blokees building blocks, further market and channel expansion, and growth across other business verticals including digital content, B2B education, and original animation production and distribution — accelerating the group's momentum in the "children + technology" space toward its vision of becoming "a world-class children's brand made in China."

"Building blocks are a cherished childhood memory and a concentrated expression of creativity," said Kaishi Chang of Source Code Capital. "Through independent R&D, Blokees has achieved remarkable product innovation in this traditional category, creating building blocks truly suited for children's development. We deeply respect the team's innovative spirit and obsessive focus on product. We believe Blokees will continue bringing consumers more scientific, higher-quality products."

Redefining Children's Building Blocks

Toys are an indispensable part of childhood consumption, and building blocks represent the most classic category among children's toys — one with the greatest potential for innovation and imagination. Blocks perfectly combine play and educational value, making them an ideal companion for healthy, happy childhood development. Drawing on domestic industry conditions and international market experience, Blokees conducted deep analysis and insight into the children's sector before ultimately selecting building blocks as its product form.

Further market research revealed a gap: Chinese parents struggled to find brands and toys truly appropriate for their children's age, especially in building blocks. The Blokees team identified five key "problems" with existing blocks: one-directional assembly with stale play patterns; difficulty in completing models, undermining children's confidence; pieces too small, posing swallowing risks; sharp corners that could cause injury; and traditional categories lacking technological innovation.

Blokees set out to create "building blocks truly suited for children's growth." Childhood is a critical period for developing physical abilities, cognitive thinking, and psychosocial skills. Therefore, toys must be age-appropriate — aligned with developmental characteristics at specific ages — to genuinely promote children's capabilities.

Blokees aimed to redefine children's blocks as something that can be built, transformed, and interacted with. Toward this goal, the company collaborated with leading Chinese and international authorities in child psychology, early education, and artificial intelligence on multi-faceted research, exploration, and validation.

Today, at Blokees' Global Child Development Lab, technical specialists continuously analyze behavioral data from over 600,000 Blokees app users, conduct annual surveys of nearly 10,000 users, conduct in-depth visits to over 1,200 families to gather and analyze feedback, and deeply understand parent and child needs. The R&D process is equally rigorous: instruction manuals and app animations undergo over 16,000 assembly tests, and each product is repeatedly tested by 1,000 children before launch. This painstaking effort ensures that every product's block pieces, model combinations, and themed play patterns best match children's unique developmental needs.

Qichu Elf Block Bucket

Blokees has carved out a distinctive path of fully independent R&D and original design for domestic building blocks. Through certifications from various authoritative institutions, Blokees has demonstrated world-class standards in material quality, production processes, in-depth research on childhood developmental stages, and the integration of blocks with logic and programming education.

Innovation accumulated drop by drop, capabilities built step by step — these have gradually constructed a moat that competitors cannot easily replicate. Blokees has now amassed over 400 patents, and its building blocks have developed a highly distinctive product form.

Full-Scenario Industry Layout, Supporting Childhood Development

The 2020 China Toys and Children's Products Industry Development White Paper showed that due to pandemic impacts, China's toys and children's products industry would face numerous unpredictable factors, with reform and development conditions becoming more severe, complex, and challenging.

China's children's consumer market is enormous. Amid the new domestic brand trend, Blokees is committed to building its own brand and changing the landscape where "copycat" products abound and consumer recognition of domestic children's brands remains low. Blokees insists on a brand-driven path, establishing high-quality, high-standard product supply chains, and integrating block products, animation IP, block-based games, and educational solutions into a watch-play-learn ecosystem covering life, entertainment, and learning scenarios — bringing new development thinking to China's children's industry.

With building blocks as the starting point, Blokees has laid out a children's industry ecosystem: T (Toy) — with blocks at the core, comprehensively upgraded educational and safe block systems aligned with children's developmental needs; A (Animation) — original 3D animation continuously mining quality content, strengthening parent-child entertainment attributes and building more harmonious family relationships; G (Game) — using entertaining educational content as a vehicle, developing premium digital content and leveraging "Internet+" technology to help children learn happily; E (Education) — based on diversified scenario-based block teaching, outputting quality AI enlightenment education solutions entering premium elementary schools, kindergartens, and early education institutions nationwide and globally, fully empowering education.

Blokees Team Series

In the full-scenario children's industry ecosystem that Blokees has built, children can watch Blokees animation for entertainment while learning block-building techniques and life knowledge; play with Blokees blocks to exercise imagination, creativity, and hands-on ability; and participate in Blokees online and offline education and various programming competitions to develop learning cognition and technological innovation capabilities for the AI era. Blokees' vision extends beyond providing a series of toys — it aims to penetrate every scenario of childhood development, helping children broaden their horizons and thinking within the Blokees system, growing up healthy and happy.

All-around innovation and full-domain layout enabled Blokees to achieve industry-leading counter-trend growth in 2020 despite the pandemic. Meanwhile, Blokees' block and education products have 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 building the entire group system and product portfolio around blocks," said Weisong Zhu. "We hope to let more Chinese children access more scientific, higher-quality products and more advanced educational concepts, thereby achieving comprehensive upgrading of the entire children's industry."