SHANGHAI & GREENWICH, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--B5M, China’s leading independent shopping search portal, today announced a $16 million Series B investment round led by ClearVue Partners (CVP). The round also included Oak Investment Partners, the lead investor from the Series A investment, as well as existing investors and several new angel investors. William A. Chen, managing director of CVP, will join the B5M board of directors. B5M has raised a total of $23.1 million to date.
“B5M aims to help Chinese consumers solve two fundamental shopping problems: ‘what to buy’ and ‘where to buy’,” said Yeogirl Yun, founder and CEO of B5M. “With this Series B funding, we can accelerate our growth in the world's biggest E-commerce market to become a premier household brand for online shopping search.”
ClearVue Partners is a private equity firm that provides growth capital to expansion stage companies in the fast-growing consumer sector in Greater China. Founding managing partner of CVP, William A. Chen, said, “B5M is a scalable search and data mining technology platform. With its independent and unbiased search user experience across multiple vertical categories, B5M is well-poised to become the biggest online shopping search portal in China.”
Ifty Ahmed, a general partner for Oak Investment Partners who led the firm’s Series A investment in B5M, commented on the news, “The current growth of B5M reminds me of Kayak in its early days, and I believe that it has the potential to achieve a similar outcome in China and become the search portal of choice for Chinese consumers. I look forward to working with William Chen and the B5M management team to help the company realize its potential.”
Launched in December 2011, B5M is China’s leading independent shopping search portal with over 300 million shopping products, product comments and merchant reviews, group-buy deals, and social shopping articles. Today, B5M has three million unique visitors and 50 million page views per day through its website, plugin, PC and mobile applications. The company sends 30 million Chinese consumers monthly to approximately 6,000 E-commerce sites in its current verticals of products, travel, group-buy, social shopping, discount products, and tickets. B5M has partnered with many premier websites in China, such as Sohu, Kaixin, Yoka, OnlyLady, JingDong, Amazon China, Dangdang, and more.
About B5M
B5M, “help me buy” in Chinese, was founded in 2007 and is the most comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased Chinese shopping search portal across multiple vertical categories with hundreds of millions of business-to-consumer products, product and merchant reviews, group-buy deals, discount products, and shopping-related web articles with innovative shopping community features to help Chinese consumers make informed purchasing decisions. B5M, headquartered in Shanghai, has offices in Beijing and Hangzhou, and also provides e-commerce search and recommendation engines to e-commerce sites for better user experience and higher conversions, and operates its own advertisement network that connects hundreds of millions of clicks daily from hundreds of premier media sites as well as B5M.com website to thousands of E-commerce website and other brand advertisers.
About ClearVue Partners (CVP）
ClearVue Partners is a private equity fund focused on investments in the fast growing and dynamic consumer sector in the Greater China region, primarily in the food and beverage, consumer lifestyle, and consumer internet/mobile sub-sectors. ClearVue targets growth stage investments in fast growing and promising local companies, enables market entry for leading international consumer brands into China, and develops top tier brands and businesses. The ClearVue team has a unique combination of investment and senior operations experience from the US and Greater China, with an advisory group of recognized business pioneers in the consumer industry.
About Oak Investment Partners
Oak Investment Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm and a lead investor in the next generation of enduring growth companies. Since 1978, the firm has invested $9 billion in nearly 500 companies around the world, earning the trust of entrepreneurs with a senior team that delivers steady guidance, deep domain expertise and a consistent investment philosophy. The firm’s five major growth sectors of focus are information technology, Internet and consumer, financial services technology, healthcare services and clean energy. For more information, visit www.oakvc.com.
For more information, please contact: pr@b5m.com.