Qihoo received $25M, a recap of 8 months

Written by Luyi Chen on November 16, 2006
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Yesterday Sina first broke the story of Qihoo’s series B funding. Total amount hasn’t been disclosed. This $25M is just first part of series B funding.

Today it’s on Techmeme, so we think it deserves a post. Here’re some details of this round funding.

The investors include Highland, Redpoint Venture, Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners and IDG. This is the first investment of Highland in China. China Renaissance is the financial advisor.

Dan Nova of Highland will join Qihoo’s board. Chuan Thor of Highland will act as board inspector. VentureBeat also has a report of this funding with more details.

Zhou Hongyi, Chairman of Qihoo is a controversial entrepreneur and investor in China. Just short before this round funding, Zhou and Jack Ma of Alibaba were in hot fight. See Venturebeat’s report: Yahoo China to file aggressive suit against Qihoo nemesis; China Wars: Zhou fights back, says Alibaba’s Ma is desperate.

Whether you like him or hate him, you cannot ignore him and his company. Within 8 months, it has raised more than $45M funding. Now its size is reported to be one third of Baidu. Let’s look back into the past 8 months how it grew into a giant Internet company.

Mar 9, 2006, Qihoo raised series A funding with $20M. Investors include Sequoia Capital, Dinghui Capital, IDG and Zhou Hongyi himself.

Jun 21, 2006, Matrix Partners raised several million USD as additional investment into Qihoo. Zhou Hongyi formally became Chinaman of Qihoo.

Qihoo is a big player in user generated content market in China. Recently it has redesigned its homepage. Now it’s totally an aggregated portal. No doubt it will generate huge revenue from advertisers.

At the same time, Qikoo has become the default search engine of Qihoo. Formerly Qikoo looks like a trial search engine focused on classifieds. Now Qihoo has moved all its search feature into Qikoo. In other words, Qikoo is going to compete with Baidu in many fields except web.

Another feather that you should notice is Qihoo Juke. This is a bit like 51Kaola that we have introduced before. But sources of Juke are all from Qihoo’s own index database. In this way, Qihoo is using grassroots editors to organize distributed information into aggregated topics.

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4 Responses to “Qihoo received $25M, a recap of 8 months”

  1. Regis Lau on November 17th, 2006 2:59 am

    Thanks for your writing on Chinese web 2.0. Keep up the good work.

    It seems to me Qihoo’s success mostly comes from Mr. Zhou Hongyi himself. Qihoo’s BBS aggregation service is not unique, nor superb. For example, http://www.daqi.com is a contender with lots of followings. Qikoo’s housing and ticket search need to compete with others as well. Even video search has its (albeit small) competitors like http://www.souxou.com. It’s interesting to see how these markets consolidate and who wins at last.

  2. kevin on November 30th, 2006 12:11 am

    Qihoo is not worth that money.

  3. Qihoo To Focus on Search-Based Q&A Service : China Web2.0 Review on March 7th, 2008 10:47 pm

    […] At the same time, 360Safe, an anti-malware security software by Qihoo, also lauched a new domain name 360.cn. It is very likely that 360Safe will be spinned off from Qihoo to develop separately. Sohu IT also reported that Qihoo secured another round of funding about $10 million for 360Safe. In 2006, Qihoo has raised two rounds of funding of about $50 million from several top-tier VCs, including Sequoia Capital, Highland Capital, Matrix Partners, Redpoint Ventures. […]

  4. Alt Search Engines » Blog Archive » Qihoo To Focus on Search-Based Q & A Service on March 12th, 2008 3:45 am

    […] At the same time, 360Safe, an anti-malware security software by Qihoo, also launched a new domain name 360.cn. It is very likely that 360Safe will be spun off from Qihoo to develop separately. Sohu IT also reported that Qihoo secured another round of funding about $10 million for 360Safe. In 2006, Qihoo has raised two rounds of funding of about $50 million from several top-tier VCs, including Sequoia Capital, Highland Capital, Matrix Partners, Redpoint Ventures. […]

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