After watching Alibaba and Tencent break into Silicon Valley, recently signing checks for big names like Lyft and Snapchat, it appears Chinese consumer electronics giants Xiaomi and JD.com are ready to hop on board.
The $40 million Series C round announced by Misfit Wearables yesterday represents the first U.S. deal for both Chinese titans, who have stepped up their venture game significantly in the past year and a half.
China has seen its fair share of established companies investing in startups, but Tencent and Alibaba have been by far the most active in the tech scene to date.
According to CrunchBase data, Tencent ranks in as China’s 7th most active venture investor on a list topped by VC veterans IDG Capital Partners and Shenzhen Capital Group.
Alibaba, the only other corporate investor to make this list, counts 18 investments over the past two years, with another 24 deals made out of its venture arm Alibaba Capital Partners.
With increasing activity from Xiaomi, China’s biggest unicorn, and JD.com, which debuted on the Nasdaq earlier this year, it looks like China’s latest batch of successful tech companies is also looking to invest some of its profits back into the market.
In the past two years, Chinese tech companies have been more active than ever in the venture scene, participating or leading 82 venture rounds for a total of over $4.6 billion invested. Last quarter marked an all-time high in number of deals, with Chinese companies recording 20 rounds for startups out of Asia and 13 out of the U.S.
There’s been a clear push by these Chinese tech giants to forge partnerships with and invest in more U.S. startups over the past two years, but the regional expansion efforts stop there.
Only one Chinese company, Qihoo 360, has ventured outside of Asia and the U.S. to report a single deal in CrunchBase for Brazil-based cloud security startup PSafe.
Image via Flickr user Eric.
