Chinese Campus Social Networking App Gains Investment

Facebook began as a campus-wide social network for students, and a newly-invested business in China is claiming a similar origin story.

Campus social software and app company tataUFO announced that they have completed Pre-B financing, which was led by SoftBank Global Star Fund and participated by Lightspeed Venture Partners and SkyChee Ventures.

Lightspeed Venture Partners and SkyChee Ventures also invested in tataUFO's round A financing.

TataUFO is the venture project of Brian Hyeon-woo Cheong, a South Korean student who studied at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing. During his study, Cheong established this platform to meet the demands of cross-school communications.

This campus social software features real-name social registrations and its core function is friend matchmaking and recommendations. At present, tataUFO claims to have over three million registered users, covering over 1,000 universities in China and abroad. In the same period of 2015, the platform only had 1.2 million users.

Initially, tataUFO only opened registration to students from three universities: Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Renmin University of China. But like Facebook, it has since opened the doors to more students and may open to users outside of schools soon.