China-based Alibaba rival Wanda E-commerce has raised $161m in its latest funding round, quadrupling the valuation of the four-month-old joint venture to 20 billion Yuan.
The two investment funds, Shengke Limited and Hong Kong Xu De Ren Dao E-commerce Investment Co., Ltd. will hold a 3% and 2% equity interest in Wanda E-commerce, respectively. The investors are fully confident in the "Tencent-Baidu-Wanda" partnership and their O2O business model.
Wanda E-commerce aims to be completely operational by the fourth quarter of 2014, when it also plans to float a second round of fundraising.
As part of efforts to challenge Alibaba’s dominance, Wanda also plans to promote its countrywide chain of over 100 malls to users of online chat, search and payment services created by Baidu and Tencent.
The e-commerce site also uses Tencent products such as TenPay and Weixin Payment, which are both competitors to Alibaba’s online payment platform Alipay.
The JV will also assist Tencent, which is planning to make the most of e-commerce potential of messaging app WeChat.
