Three more top students will ring the bell! From 200,000 to a valuation of over 2 billion US dollars, black technology has found a way out

From a start-up of RMB 200,000 to a valuation of US$2 billion, how does Kujiale use technology to leverage the home decoration industry?

Author丨Zhao Xiaoxiao

Editor丨Kong Lujiao

Source丨Photo Network

Tang Zhen (IKEA designer) can’t remember exactly how many plans he has designed on Kujiale.

The Kujiale she calls is an online home design platform. The three co-founders Huang Xiaohuang, Chen Hang, and Zhu Hao were alumni. Graduated from UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), a public Ivy League school in the United States, and have worked for top Internet companies such as NVIDIA, Google, and Amazon. They all have strong technical genes.

In 2011, Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang founded Kujiale and later invited Zhu Hao to join. The platform initially only provided online design tools, but then continued to expand its product and service system and began to provide solutions for marketing, production, management, supply chain and other scenarios. As a leader in the home design software industry, Kujiale is favored by capital. It completes one financing on average every year. In 2019, its valuation exceeded US$1 billion, making it an industry unicorn.

In 2020, Kujiale completed a new round of financing, led by Hillhouse Capital and Coatue, with a post-investment valuation of over US$2 billion.

Recently, Kujiale was revealed to be planning to go public in the United States, and has selected Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan as joint lead underwriters. The fund-raising scale is expected to be 5 billion, the entrepreneurial stories of these three alumni and the luxurious investment lineup behind them have gradually emerged.

Kujiale founding team

From left to right are CTO Zhu Hao, Chairman Huang Xiaohuang, and CEO Chen Hang

Returning from Silicon Valley to start a business

Behind Kujiale is the story of three alumni working together to start a business.

In 2008, two computer science graduates from Zhejiang University, Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang, chose to go to UIUC for further studies. On the plane to the United States, they met a computer science student from Tsinghua University who also went to UIUC to study. Graduate Zhu Hao.

At that time, China’s home furnishing software industry was just budding. Chen Weichang, a Ph.D. from Columbia University, established MyHome3D Company in the United States, the predecessor of Aifuwo (a home improvement Internet O2O service provider). In China, Yuanfang Software (an IT technology solution provider for the home furnishing industry) founded in 1994 has been dancing "solo".

After graduation, both Huang Xiaohuang and Zhu Hao stayed in the United States to work as engineers, while Chen Hang chose to return to China. At this time, China's online home decoration industry was developing rapidly, and VCs began to take notice and were willing to make tentative investments. This year, Huang Xiaohuang, who was working as a software engineer at Nvidia, decided to return to China to start a business and invited alumnus Chen Hang to join him. They scraped together 200,000 yuan and built Kujiale in a small house with a few second-hand equipment. prototype.

Starting a business is not easy. Although Huang Xiaohuang and Chen Hang learned graphics and image rendering technology at UIUC, they are still somewhat unable to implement the technology. In early 2012, they called Zhu Hao and invited him to join. At that time, Zhu Hao was at a low point in his work in Silicon Valley, so he quickly returned to China to join. In the same year, Cai Zhisen, who served as vice president of Yuanfang Software, left to start a business and founded 3D Home in Guangzhou with three partners.

Huang Xiaohuang sees the broad prospects behind home software technology and wants to use technology to solve the pain points of the home industry. After conducting market tests in interior design, architecture, film and other industries, they found that the rapid rendering rendering technology has the best feedback in the home furnishing industry, and some home furnishing companies have also begun to seek cooperation. So, they naturally decided on this direction.

At the end of November 2013, Kujiale was officially launched. The platform provides home decoration designers with a large amount of materials, including three-dimensional models of apartments and furniture, and SaaS design tools that render extremely fast in 10 seconds. . Less than three months after its launch, there were various posts on Weibo discussing the new platform, and Kujiale’s popularity quickly spread. In April 2014, Kujiale became the most active home improvement community in the country.

Kujiale has been able to achieve rapid development and the number of users has grown rapidly, which has also caught up with the dividends of the Internet to a certain extent. Starting from 2014, the Internet home decoration industry became popular. Zhou Jianzhong founded Digital China, Cui Jian established Decoration Home in Beijing, and before that, Chen Weichang returned from the United States and established Aifuwo.

For a time, the home software industry has become extremely crowded. But Kujiale has won a share of the fierce competition with its 10-second ultra-fast rendering technology.

Kujiale office environment (Source: Internet)

What can support the IPO?

"Technology changes the world", this is a sentence that Huang Xiaohuang often talks about.

From the beginning, Kujiale has not positioned itself as a home decoration company, but as a technology company. Both the company founder and the company's products reveal a strong sense of technology.

In the early days of entrepreneurship, Kujiale won a customer base through word-of-mouth and chose crowdsourcing to build a library of house plans. After opening the market, Kujiale made another key decision, choosing universal rather than personalized SaaS services.

"As a newly established SaaS company, we need a solid data base and standardized product architecture. We hope that universal functions can serve a wider range of small and medium-sized enterprises." Chen Hang Zeng told Entrepreneurship State.

From 2014 to 2016, it was the craziest three years for Internet home decoration. With the advent of the industrial Internet era, Kujiale, which initially relied on the Internet to acquire new users and build a reputation, has gained a deeper understanding of home furnishing industrialization and is trying to provide ecological solution services for the home furnishing industry under the trend of the industrial Internet.

Starting from 2017, Kujiale has shifted its development focus to B-end users, using technological means such as AR shopping and VR scenes to cooperate with Lin's Wood Industry and Meikemeijia. and other home furnishing brands to start cooperation. In 2018, Kujiale launched BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology in an attempt to bridge the gap between the design end and the construction end; and then released a one-stop digital solution to help the home furnishing industry from channels, marketing, design to production, construction and other links. Industrial digital upgrade.

From providing rendering tools for designers, to providing marketing tools for home building materials dealers, to using data and scenarios to deeply empower home furnishing, home decoration, building materials and other links. , Kujiale has always used technology as a sharp knife to enter the market step by step and build its own moat.

Today, KooLab has three research centers across the country: Hangzhou R&D Center, Shanghai Huangpu Research Institute and Chengdu Tianfu Engineering Institute. There is also a team behind it - KooLab, focused on Explore the world's cutting-edge scientific research results such as computer graphics and AI artificial intelligence to promote changes in the home furnishing industry.

IKEA designer’s rendering on Kujiale (Source: Interviewee)

First-line VC competition

Technology is Kujiale’s strongest starting advantage and a key trump card in attracting investors.

Kujiale has come a long way and has completed at least 8 rounds of financing. The investment lineup behind it is also getting bigger and bigger, including IDG Capital, GGV Capital, Matrix Partners There are more than ten domestic and foreign first-line funds such as China, Mingshi Capital, Hearst Capital, Yunqi Capital, Shunwei Capital, Temasek, Hillhouse Capital, Coatue, and Linear Capital.

The financing story of Kujiale starts with the founders and early Facebook employee Wang Huai.

Before deciding to return to China in 2011, Huang Xiaohuang was looking for investment in Silicon Valley, but after talking to fifty or sixty funds, they were unwilling to invest in him. I thought that returning to China to raise funds would be smoother, but I didn’t expect that after queuing in front of investors for a whole day and getting a 5-minute introduction opportunity, the investors rejected it in just 1 minute.

After the storm, a rainbow finally appeared, and Huang Xiaohuang, Chen Hang, and Zhu Hao ushered in a turning point. Wang Huai, an early employee of Facebook who is also an alumnus of Zhejiang University, has always wanted to capture technology-driven startups. He soon became an angel investor of Kujiale, and also helped Kujiale get to know Mao Chengyu, the then IDG Capital partner. Currently a founding partner of Yunqi Capital). In 2013, Kujiale received tens of millions of yuan in Series A investment from IDG Capital.

The real turning point for Kujiale came after IDG Capital came in. At that time, they had two choices, one was 2B and the other was 2C. Kujiale was essentially a tool, and it was very suitable to go into the 2B direction, but Mao Chengyu’s suggestion was to go into 2C. Subsequently, Kujiale relied on the traffic accumulated on the C-side to provide SaaS services to B-side designers and decoration companies, achieving a seamless transition from home decoration design tools to enterprise service software.

After the model was clarified, Kujiale’s financing path became increasingly smooth. In addition to the above angel round and IDG Capital’s Series A investment, Kujiale*** completed 5 rounds of financing between 2014 and 2019. In 2019, after Kujiale completed the D+ round of financing led by Hillhouse Capital and followed by Shunwei Capital, GGV Capital and others, its valuation exceeded US$1 billion, making it an industry unicorn in one fell swoop.

Kujiale’s latest round of financing was in 2020, led by Hillhouse Capital and Coatue. The post-investment valuation exceeded US$2 billion, and this new After a round of investment, Coatue entered the game for the first time. Compared with its valuation of US$1 billion after the D+ round of investment in 2019, Kujiale's valuation has doubled again in just one year.

In the process of continuous trial and error, Kujiale has found its own profit model. SaaS software sales have become its main source of income, with revenue in 2020 exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.

Currently, the Kujiale platform has more than 25 million registered users, more than 40 million product model materials, more than 5 million renderings generated every day, and more than 20,000 cooperative brand companies. , designers are located in more than 180 countries and regions around the world, and the overall coverage of the Chinese home furnishing market exceeds 70%.

Now, this 10-year-old home software unicorn is about to go public in the United States. Obviously, Kujiale is ready.

“The key to listing lies in whether Kujiale’s strategy, business, and products can be better. New business must be expanded to a certain proportion in order to support the success after listing. The next high point," Huang Xiaohuang said in an interview with the media.