Love21cn’s Funding and China’s Online Dating Market

Written by Tangos on June 6, 2007
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Love21cnLove21cn, an online dating site, finished its series A funding of $10 million led by Ignition Partners, i.e. Qiming Ventures Partners. Just one month ago, Love21cn also announced that it received 40 million Yuan from three co-founders of New Oriental(Nasdaq:EDU), an education service company. But according to Qiming Ventures’ official press release, the amount received from founders of New Oriental is several million Yuan.

Love21cn was founded in October 2003, and now has about 5.5 million registered users. The partnership strategy should have brought many users to Love21cn. Since 2005, Love21cn has partnered with MSN China to provide online dating service to MSN’s users at the cost of 4 million Yuan a year. The traffic data of Alexa shows that the traffic of MSN Love21cn channel accounts for more than 50% of MSN China’s total traffic. In 2006, Love21cn started to cooperate with Tom to provide service. In last month, it announced partnership with Sina, it is said Love21cn has to pay about 10 million yuan to Sina for the cooperation.

Marry5Love21cn’s main competitors include Baihe, Marry5 and Edodo.net. Marry5, a Shenzhen-based company, raised $12.5 million from SAIF in June 2005. Marry5 also aggressively forge partnership with portal websites, it partnered with Sohu in 2006. Interestingly, Marry5 spent nearly ten million Yuan to become MSN China’s partner as well, so there are two directly competitive channels in MSN China, provided by Love21cn and Marry5 respectively.

BaiheBaihe, founded in May 2005 and whose featured service is professional psychological test to pair up subscribers, received $11 million in its two round funding in 2006 and 2005 from Mayfield Funds, GSR Ventures and others. While Edodo.net was acquired by Match.com, which we reported on Feb 2007, it is widely reported that Match.com contacted with Love21cn since last year, but it chose Edodo.net finally.

One Response to “Love21cn’s Funding and China’s Online Dating Market”

  1. dating » Love21cn’s Funding and China’s Online Dating Market : China Web2.0 Review on October 6th, 2007 5:35 am

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