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While Chinese Business Social Apps are Raising New Funding, Big Players like WeChat is Coming in the Market

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Chinese enterprise software developer Facishare announced tens of millions of dollars in Series B funding that is led by Northren Light and joined by Huaruan Venture Capital Partnership, Boya Capital and existing investor IDG.

When the firm made the previous investment in Facishare last year, IDG argued that they believed enterprise social service or other software would be widely adopted in China soon.

Facishare and Mingdao stood out from the crowd of Yammer wannabes in China. Facishare, founded in 2011, would later decide to become more like salesforce with an addition of collaborative service in 2013.

No matter Yammer or Salesforce, a lot of Chinese enterprise social or performance management services would find themselves wanting to be WeChat for business. The WeChat-like layer with Facishare is shamelessly named “WeChat for Business”. Their reason was obvious, as more than one founders told me so, that everyone in China knows how to use WeChat.

Now WeChat is coming in to the market. WeChat Account for Enterprise is under development, as reported by tech industry insider Yang Miao (report in Chinese). As WeChat public accounts have been able to do a lot of things, from pushing content to accept payments, and many businesses have developed sophisticated features, including navigation menu or HTML5-based rich media content, for their accounts, it won’t be surprising to see some features for performance management or other types of interactions for the WeChat Account for Enterprise.

And companies like us who are literally working in a WeChat group on a daily basis will embrace it with no doubt.

It’s actually not a surprise as Tencent, WeChat’s parent company, has been operating Enterprise QQ IM and RTX (Real Time Exchange), an online messaging service designed for enterprises. Both of which, however, are not very successful in China. While a large number of SMEs are using Enterprise QQ which charges services fees, it’s only a minor revenue stream for the company.

Many believe Tencent cannot do everything on mobile just like it was on the Web. Some don’t believe Tencent will succeed in the WeChat for enterprise wither. It’s unknown the investors who just have funded Facishare and other similar services will feel worried when the WeChat one come out. Facishare, being confident, claims they’ve had more than 50,000 clients — The number disclosed one year ago was 12, 000.

Tracey Xiang is Beijing, China-based tech writer. Reach her at tracey@technode.com

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