Knowing that it completed a US$100 million Series D financing, today's capital led the investment, Tencent Sogou continued to follow suit

Zhihu, the largest knowledge platform in China, announced today that it has successfully completed D-round 's financing of US $100m. The investors are Today Capital, and the original directors and shareholders, including Tencent, Sogou, Qiming, Innovation works, etc., have also followed suit.

original title: Zhihu completes D-round 's US $100m financing Today

Zhihu, the largest knowledge platform in China, announced today that it has successfully completed D-round 's US $100m financing. The investors are Today's Capital, including Tencent, Sogou, Qiming, Innovation works and other original directors and shareholders.

Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, revealed in an internal letter to employees this morning, "the speed of this round of financing is the fastest in history. In fact, it was agreed before we could write PPT, and the money arrived very quickly. $100m was recorded on the 8th of last month." At the same time, in 2017, Zhihu will open up new scenes for a wide range of knowledge consumers, make the knowledge market a real market, and achieve large-scale advertising revenue capacity, Zhou said.

Today, Xu Xin, founding partner and president of Capital, said: "We have been observing Zhihu for more than a year, and we are sorry to miss it in the C round. We are very excited when we finally get the opportunity to come in. Today's capital is a 28-year-old evergreen fund, a good company we have patience and so on, but also worth holding for a long time. We feel that Zhihu is doing a very right thing; do not chase the tuyere, grasp the good market segments and work hard, grasp the needs of users to make the products well, and grow bigger and bigger on this basis. Today's Zhihu not only represents questions and answers, but when it can further make a breakthrough around the supply and demand of knowledge, it is likely to become a great company to meet users' multi-scene content consumption and more needs. We also hope to help Zhihu build a long-term brand, thus giving full play to its greater value as a high-performance platform. "

according to public data, Zhihu received a multimillion-yuan angel round financing from Innovation works in January 2011, a multimillion-dollar round invested by QiMing Venture Partners in January 2012, a $22 million round B financing from Saifu Fund and QiMing Venture Partners in June 2014, and round C financing in September 2015. investors include Tencent and Sogou.

according to official statistics, as of January 2017, Zhihu had more than 65 million registered users, with an average of 18.5 million active users per day. For the whole of 2016, Zhihu users asked more than 6 million questions, wrote more than 23 million answers and 1.51 million articles.

< strong > the following is the full text of Zhihu's internal letter: < / strong >

Pirates,

recently, everyone has been thinking about the 2017 work plan from our current strategy of building a large knowledge platform for a wide range of knowledge consumers and institutional partners. I guess many colleagues may have doubts about how we should achieve this goal. And what does this goal mean?

the simple answer is: we can forget this goal. Why? Because this is the result of stages in the development of the company, no matter how meaningful and accurate the concept is, the result should be something naturally formed after a large number of valuable work.

user needs are the source of valuable work, and our focus should be on working around changing user needs.

Why did we do institutional accounts, advertising products, bookstores, Live, value and sharing in the past 2016? Putting aside all the external comments, we make a summary of ourselves, and a positive answer is that Zhihu team is more active than ever in embracing changes in user needs and trying to change itself at the same time.

take institutional accounts as an example. We have not allowed institutional accounts to register and use Zhihu in the first four years after our establishment. Because we are worried that if we allow it, it will destroy the community atmosphere and hurt the user's experience, so we have made the corresponding rules. This rule has been implemented for four years, but the question is, what exactly are the needs of institutions and organizations? How do they communicate with ordinary users in the real world? Is it possible to try the product around specific needs? These really valuable questions, the whole team from top to bottom, but no one cares.

the launch of institutional accounts is a very positive change in 2016. we spend a lot of time investigating and understanding the needs of users, and thinking about how an organization and a group of users interact with each other in the real world. What are the demands? what are the obstacles? is it possible to significantly improve the communication experience between the two sides through product improvement? These efforts have enabled us to make positive progress. When institutional account products are launched, they actually provide opportunities for enriching the community ecology.

to give another example, why do we do Live? Is it because the content payment + consumption upgrade tuyere is currently? A few days ago, I saw some media take Live as an example to demonstrate that the wind has arrived. I think it's quite funny. If we don't do this tomorrow, is it that the wind has stopped? In fact, we observed in 2015 that a group of users in Zhihu often received demand for paid consultation, and then we went to research and found that the user experience path was very awkward, the payment was fragmented, and the communication was scattered. This is very obvious from the demand generated by Zhihu, but our products can not help users to complete it with low cost and high efficiency, so should we do something? This gives rise to Live.

all new product scenarios come from the needs of users. It is always our goal to understand users deeply, to understand those real and small changes, and then to iterate the product and upgrade Zhihu's core competence.

the requirement is not the goal, but the user itself. Will knowing everything we have solidify our cognition? To eliminate the shackles in the brain, not a leaf blindness, in order to find a larger world.

to be honest, we are already in a highly competitive environment, and new industry giants are on the rise. Winning in the competition is certainly a result, but Google to Microsoft,iPhone to Nokia is ostensibly a competition to pursue results, but in essence, it is the migration of users' needs, which is measured by the extent to which you understand users' needs, improve them, or even improve them.

in Zhihu today, people's real questions and answers and sharing every day have produced a large number of original and high-quality content, which not only solves their problems in each other's work and life, but also continues to be injected into the entire Chinese Internet for everyone to use. In 2016, our newly launched institutional account has enriched the ecology of the platform, built its own advertising product system, and laid the foundation for the company's large-scale profits, while in the field of knowledge market, the brand-new Zhihu Live, bookstore and value-based business have brought new possibilities for knowledge workers to directly earn profits. This is something to be proud of. Zhihu has gradually grown from a community into a platform, creating unprecedented value.

of course, put aside the achievements that are easy to see. What's more, we don't change fast enough, we don't have a deep understanding of users, and we lack a sense of urgency to upgrade our products from easy to use to excellent. In fact, we can't call it easy to use in many places.

I hope our team, in the face of the external environment, should be calm, face the needs of users, and take the initiative. To a large platform + X small team way, around the real needs of users, rapid iteration, push through the old and come up with new products. In this way, Zhihu will have the opportunity to become a product of value to users in the next 10 years or more.

now that 2017 has begun, our first task is to optimize and discover various scenarios in which users are generating high-quality content, focusing on the needs of users. Zhihu should not only provide the best experience for the emerging middle class and knowledge class, but also provide tools for those who share useful and valuable content, expand the scene, and let them gain respect and recognition. Let knowledge workers have a real stage, so that valuable knowledge can be realized; at the same time, it is necessary to build a good enough consumption network for a wide range of knowledge consumers.

New year, ask a few questions--

for the knowledge market, we are still doing a lot of recommendation and operation, so how to give users richer and powerful tools to become dominant? at the same time, we focus on the improvement of the tools and the efficiency and fairness of the market mechanism.

Q & An is a scenario, and the way users communicate has changed a lot. which of the new media forms do we need to deeply understand and improve into the product? Is the existing approach reducing the cost of users or limiting their scenarios?

how will the content form change in the future? now that we have turned a book into multiple discussions and sharing, it is not possible to form a more effective interaction? How does the granular information from 1 minute to 1 hour adapt to the new consumption needs of users?

Advertising should also be a kind of valuable content. What are the expectations of users and customers? What can be improved by the product?

for this reason, I have established the annual OKRs of Zhihu: link

Objective: open up a new scene for a wide range of knowledge consumers

Objective: realize large-scale advertising revenue

Objective: the knowledge market has become a real market

finally, synchronized with you, the financing of Zhihu D-round has been successfully completed, the new investor is Today's Capital, and all other directors and shareholders have followed suit. The speed of this round of financing is the first in history. In fact, it has been agreed before writing PPT, and the money is also very fast. 100 million US dollars have already been recorded on the 8th of last month.

as I said before, to find investment is not to find change, but to find teammates. Xu Xin has invested in a number of well-known enterprises such as NetEase, JD.com and Meituan-Dianping. He is an investor with rich experience and resources. Welcome new partners on board.

Zhihu's valuation has increased several times in the past year, which is inseparable from what Zhihu team did and achieved in 2016. I hope you will continue to work hard and use users as the source to create greater value.

Edit: nancy