Zhihu Crowned China's First Knowledge Sharing Unicorn With $100 Million Series D Round Financing

(Chinese Version)

“This is the quickest round of financing in Zhihu’s history. In fact, the investment agreement was reached even before we prepared the PPT, and over $100 million has already been transferred to us on December 8th, 2016” Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, revealed in the internal letter. Finally, Series D round financing of the largest knowledge-sharing platform in China was completed.

On January 12th, 2017, Zhihu announced that they had completed $100 million D-round financing, led by Capital Today. Existing investors Tencent, Sogou, Inc., SAIF Partners, Innovation Works, and Qiming Venture Partners all participated in the round. After this round, Zhihu’s valuation is expected to reach over $1 billion, making it another unicorn in the Chinese internet circle.

“Seeking investment isn’t simply about seeking money, but rather seeking teammates,” Zhou maintained, “In 2017, Zhihu plans to become a large-scale knowledge platform targeting not only the large crowd of knowledge consumers but also organizations and partners.”

In other words, Zhihu will not only provide the best discussion experience for the rising middle class and the intellectual stratum and help knowledge workers gain respect and recognition, but also build an efficient platform for knowledge consumers and make knowledge profitable.

This is also the biggest investment of Capital Today for the past year. Xu Xin, founding partner of Capital Today, pointed out:

We have been observing Zhihu for over a year. It’s a pity we missed the C-round, so we are really excited to be finally involved in D-round.

Capital Today has over 28 years of history, so we are able to invest them for a long period of time and wait for great companies to shine. For us, Zhihu has always been doing something great: without chasing the trend blindly, Zhihu manages to further explores its existing market, better satisfy users’ needs.

Today, Zhihu is not only about question and answer. When it can make major breakthrough on providing solutions for people’s demand for knowledge, it will become a greater company that can satisfy users’ needs in various scenarios. It is our wish that we can help Zhihu further explore its potential and become a more efficient and valuable platform in the future.

By this January, Zhihu has already owned over 65 million registered users, with over 18.5 million active users every day. Throughout 2016, over 6 million questions were asked on Zhihu, while over 23 million answers and over 1.51 million articles are submitted.

Zhihu Live also proves to be a new way to make knowledge profitable. Since Zhihu officially launched the service on May 14th, 2016, over 1,500 Zhihu Live shows have been hosted. The average hourly rate of 737 knowledge-sharing speakers reached 10,980 RMB (around $1,591), the largest number of participants for a Zhihu Live show reached 120,000, while the highest revenue of a Zhihu Live show reached 190,000. (Edited and compiled by TMTpost editor Hejing)

Zhou Yuan(founder and CEO of Zhihu)’s internal letter

For the past few days, all of us have been trying to figure out our own work plan in 2017 centered around our unified goal: become a large-scale knowledge platform not only for the large crowd of knowledge consumers but also for organizations and partners. I believe many of you may have questions like: how can we reach this goal? What does this goal mean?

The simplest answer is: we might as well forget this goal. How come? This unified goal, no matter how meaningful and accurate it is, is the natural result of the large amount of tiny work by every one of us. Users’ need should be the source of valuable work, so we should  be always focusing on users’ changing need.

For the past year, why did we carry out functions such as organization accounts, ads, bookstore and Zhihu Live? Regardless of what the outside said out these additions, for us, Zhihu has been even more active than before in embracing users’ changing need and changing ourselves.

Take for example Zhihu organization account: for the first four years, we don’t allow organizations to register and user Zhihu, fearing that it might affect the atmosphere of our community and undermine users experience. However, what are the needs of these organizations? How do they interact with ordinary users? Is it possible for Zhihu to carry out a new function to satisfy their needs? Most of us ignored these valuable questions. However, we finally became aware of the problems and carried out lots of surveys and interviews to figure out what an organization really need, how an organization interacts with users, what obstacles they have and what they need most, as well as if it is possible for us to change such situation through our product. After we launched the function, it turned to be very successful and significantly diversified our community.

What about Zhihu Live, then? The other day, I noticed that some media cited Zhihu Live as an example to demonstrate that the golden era of paid content and upgraded consumption has come. This is hilarious. If Zhihu stopped doing it, then would the golden era also stop? As a matter of fact, we noticed that there were a group of Zhihu users who were asked if they could provide paid consulting service as early as 2015. Since such needs emerge in our platform but we couldn’t meet these users’ need in a cost-efficient way at that time, we decided to carry out Zhihu Live.

All user scenarios for new functions and services come from users’ needs. Only by figuring out what users need, noticing those little but true changes and upgrading our product can we enhance the core competence. Only by getting rid of all types of stereotypes and not getting easily satisfied by our existing progress can we find an even bigger world.

To be honest, we are in a hyper-competitive market and new giants are rising every day. On the surface, Google outperformed Microsoft while iPhone outperformed Nokia through competition. Fundamentally, however, it’s actually the shift of users’ needs. Those who understand users’ need, perfect their product to better meet these needs will ultimately stand out. Today, millions of users share their questions and answers on Zhihu and a large amount of original and high-quality content is produced every day, which not only helps satisfy users’ personal needs in work and life, but also continuously diversifies the Chinese internet world and brings convenience to everyone.

To meet users’ actual needs and upgrade our product accordingly, Zhihu is composed of several teams focusing on different areas. Only through this way can Zhihu continue to be useful for users in the next decade. 2017 has already come. Our biggest goal in this new year is still to focus on users’ needs, enhance and explore more scenarios where users could create high-quality content. We shall not only provide the best user experience for the rising middle class and knowledge stratum, but also become an efficient tool for people to share useful or worthwhile content, gain respect and recognition. Our goal is to not only help knowledge workers find a great stage to make knowledge profitable, but also build an efficient consumption network for the large crowd of knowledge consumers.

For the coming new year, I have the following questions for you: How can we help users dominate in the content we recommend to them while we could focus our attention on perfecting the efficiency and fairness of the market mechanism? What services and functions should be further improved to adapt to the changing users’ needs? Are existing ways efficient in reducing their cost, or on the contrary, limiting users? How can we make interaction more effective and diversified? How can we meet users’ new consumption needs, from one minute to an hour? What are users and clients’ expectation for ads? What aspect of our product can be upgraded?

Therefore, I summarized our OKRs for Zhihu in 2017:

• Exploring new scenarios for the large crowd of knowledge consumers
• Making steady revenue through ads
• Making the “knowledge market” a true “market”

At last, I have a piece of good news for you: our D-round financing has already been completed. This round is led by Capital Today, and existing investors also continued their investment. As I have mentioned before, seeking investment isn’t simply about seeking money, but rather teammates. Xu Xin, founding partner of Capital Today, has rich experience in nurturing enterprises and have already nurtured some well-known enterprises such as NetEase, JD and Meituan Dianping. At the same time, Zhihu’s valuation almost quadrupled during the past year, which is the natural result of our effort and sweat. In the coming year, I wish all of us will continue to work hard, find inspiration through users’ needs and create even greater value.

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[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @TMTpost-Chinese, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at PAGE TO PAGE), working for TMTpost.

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