Mafengwo, a Chinese social travel platform has announced Series D funding of $133 million.
General Atlantic is named as a new investor in the round alongside Ocean Link, Temasek, Yuantai Investment and Hopu. Existing investors also participated in this latest financing round.
The company plans to use the funds to continue to expand its platform with increased user-generated content as well as more advanced analytics to improve the user experience.
Mafengwo was founded in 2010 initially as an online travel community and has become an online travel platform with user-generated reviews of destinations, hotels, attractions and local activities to help independent travellers in China.
Gang Lv, co-Founder and COO of Mafengwo, says:
“Mafengwo began as one of China’s largest tourism communities and has since evolved to become an independent online travel service platform that covers over 60,000 travel destinations globally and leverages advanced analytics to provide a unique user experience.
"Our platform continues to be differentiated due to our community of users, who generate diverse and candid feedback, recommendations, and ideas, and our AI-enabled platform, which makes it easy for our users to find the content and recommendations they need to make travel plans.”
Co-founder Gang Chen adds:
“We believe Mafengwo can become China’s largest travel services platform and the interest from leading global investors in our company underscores our success so far. As long as there are destinations for travelers to visit, there will be services for Mafengwo to provide to improve their experience.”
And Eric Zhang, managing director and head of china for General Atlantic says:
“Chinese consumers from the younger generation have grown up in the era of mobile internet and prefer to explore the world through independent travel.
“With several years of experience in the online travel industry, Mafengwo is highly regarded by its users due to its high-quality user-generated content and continuous efforts to enhance its mobile product and transaction platform. We continue to see exciting innovation in mobile internet services and believe that the company is well-positioned for growth as Chinese travelers continue to raise their expectations for quality. We look forward to working closely with the Mafengwo team to continue to provide better travel services to Chinese consumers.”
Mafengwo raised a Series C round in early 2015 with Expedia founder Rich Barton participating. Local reports put the amount at $100 million at the time.