Juli Xinfang Closes $10 Million Series B Round, Existing Investor Source Code Capital Continues to Double Down

On August 17, Wang Peng, founder and CEO of Juli Xinfang, announced that Juli Xinfang had become the first new-home e-commerce platform to complete a Series B funding round. The round was led by Vertex Ventures China, with existing investor Source Code Capital continuing to participate, raising tens of millions of dollars in total.

Juli Xinfang (formerly Kanjia.com) was founded in 2014 and is a leading new-home e-commerce platform in China. It uses big data to precisely match consumer needs, helping buyers efficiently find suitable properties. Currently, Juli Xinfang operates in seven cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Chengdu — covering more than 400 cooperative residential projects, and has become the largest new-home e-commerce platform in the country, ranking first in market share in both Beijing and Shanghai.

The lead investor, Vertex Ventures China, is an early-stage investment fund under Singapore's Temasek Holdings, with previous investments including Mobike and Changba. Managing Partner Xu Ying stated: "Vertex Ventures China has been consistently investing in online-to-offline models that address efficiency problems in high-stakes consumer decision-making. We strongly endorse Juli's operational model, which combines online data-driven approaches with offline self-operated services. The team's deep industry experience and rapid learning capabilities enable the company to keep pace with industry trends and transformation directions. We are optimistic that Juli Xinfang will maintain its leading position in the industry."

Existing investor Source Code Capital, which continued to participate in this round, focuses on information technology investments and currently manages $750 million USD and 3 billion RMB. Its portfolio companies include Toutiao, Qudian, and Yijiupi. Xingshi Wang, investment vice president at Source Code Capital, noted that Juli Xinfang's model — acquiring customers online at scale, matching different clients with different properties, and providing offline service through a high-quality consultant team — can greatly satisfy current homebuyers' needs and expectations. From a product perspective, Juli Xinfang offers more precise supply-demand matching, higher per-capita efficiency, and continuous data-driven product iteration, indicating enormous growth potential ahead.

1 The Immense Potential of Major City Cluster New-Home Markets

The New York metropolitan area, centered on New York City, comprises five major cities and over 40 medium and small cities with populations exceeding 100,000. Thanks to convenient commuting, those who choose to live in dual-city arrangements often enjoy more comfortable lives than those crammed into the urban core.

Wang Peng, CEO of Juli Xinfang, believes this reality is drawing closer for young people floating in China's first-tier cities. "In the next ten years, China will form 20 metropolitan areas, five of them mega-regions," he said. National-level city clusters that have been in planning and construction for nearly a decade are taking shape one after another, with earlier initiatives already maturing.

The 2010 China City Cluster Development Report shows that the Yangtze River Delta city cluster, with Shanghai at its core, is internationally recognized as one of the world's six major city clusters. In 2015, the Politburo of the CPC Central Committee approved the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development Plan, aiming to build "a world-class city cluster with the capital at its core."

In mid-2017, the National Development and Reform Commission website published Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Development of Suburban Railway, which for the first time clarified that before 2020, backbone suburban railway lines would take shape in megacities, large cities, and qualified major cities in economically developed regions including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, the middle Yangtze River region, and the Chengdu-Chongqing area. These would create "one-hour commuting circles" from core areas to surrounding major regions. When that happens, the morning rush hour in Yanjiao will no longer begin at 5 or 6 a.m.

To support the rise of city clusters and safeguard the lives of new urban residents, more housing is coming to market. Shanghai's 13th Five-Year Plan explicitly calls for increasing land supply for housing, with plans to add 1.7 million units. Following the tightening of Beijing's property market controls on March 17, the pace of land supply has accelerated — 161 hectares of commercial residential land was supplied in the first quarter alone, 6.2 times the amount during the same period last year.

2 In the "Second Half" of New-Home Sales, User Experience Is King

As new-home sales enter their second half, property services have entered theirs too. Wang Peng, CEO of Juli Xinfang, identifies three keywords for this second half: "channel dominance," "experience supremacy," and "data-driven operations." This battle will be won by talent, not by sheer numbers.

Since its founding, Juli Xinfang has insisted on recruiting high-quality, highly educated consultants, committed to fundamentally changing consumers' mental image of "the middleman." Currently, 89% of Juli Xinfang consultants graduated from first-tier universities, with 61.8% from Project 985 and Project 211 institutions, 14.3% holding master's degrees, and another 5.7% having studied overseas. Consultants don't need to try to understand their users — because they largely belong to the same demographic, they intuitively grasp user needs and can assist clients in customizing home-purchase plans from a life-planning perspective.

Juli Xinfang's "building up reserves" also manifests in database construction and AI system R&D. It is truly a company built on data, having fully digitized new-home transaction entry points, transaction behaviors, and order management. Currently, Juli Xinfang has connected with multiple search, e-commerce, and content platforms to discover property-related information across the entire web, accumulating substantial project data, property consultations, and purchase records, with over 760,000 words of detailed customer reviews. Its current intelligent property-client matching system can already match projects based on user needs and preferences, with voice search scheduled for imminent release.

Wang Peng believes: "It's still too early to talk about artificial intelligence. But over the next two years, we will gradually build out Juli Xinfang's property service ecosystem, including intelligent customer service, intelligent matching, intelligent viewing route planning, the Paul Index (new-home transaction trend prediction), market big data, virtual reality viewings, and intelligent ad placement. In the future, Juli Xinfang will become a one-stop smart living solution provider encompassing new homes, rentals, and resale properties."

3 Capital Markets Bullish on New-Home E-Commerce

Since February 2017, Juli Xinfang has reached 1.2 million monthly visitors and 1 billion RMB in monthly transaction volume, pioneering the e-commerce model for property's second half. With the industry's highest customer satisfaction, per-capita efficiency, and data foundation, Juli Xinfang has begun its national expansion. And in August this year, it became the first in the new-home e-commerce industry to secure Series B funding, with total proceeds reaching tens of millions of dollars.

"Property transactions are a low-frequency industry, but Juli Xinfang insists on achieving extremely high customer satisfaction. As scale expands, word-of-mouth will bring in more new customers — and only service enterprises with high customer satisfaction can secure long-term competitive advantages." Xingshi Wang of existing investor Source Code Capital believes that Juli Xinfang's entire purchase process is standardized, transparent, and professional, able to stand in the customer's shoes and objectively help clients analyze and decide. Juli Xinfang also excels in the refined management of conversion rates and the cultivation of its consultant team — reflections of the company's internal capabilities. Through big data operations, its per-capita efficiency far exceeds industry averages.

Yang Zhao, partner at early investor K2VC, stated that Juli Xinfang is a pioneer in China's new-home direct sales space. The team has achieved a complete closed loop from online traffic to offline orders through meticulous data optimization, while combining high-quality consultant services to provide users with a premium, efficient new-home purchase experience. K2VC is very optimistic about Juli Xinfang's continued innovation and development in the property sector.