Sequoia Capital Invests in CERNET-Koncept to develop China Campus Channel
Cdream Media Platform Reaches 20+ million Chinese Students
Beijing, China, August 1, 2008- CERNET Koncept, the holder of exclusive rights to provide digital media services and advertising to China’s university students, have recently closed a Series A round with Sequoia to expand their next generation services to Chinese Campus Channel and allow advertisers a unique new media channel to effectively reach youth in China.
Established in 2007, CERNET Koncept is a joint venture between CERNET (The China Education and Research Network, which is itself a cooperative between the Ministry of Education and Chinese Government) and Koncept Group, Ltd (a developer and provider of digital media platform, content and marketing). This joint venture provides a large scale communications, educational and entertainment services to Chinese universities, which is now open to advertisers as a way of reaching this valuable youth audience.
CERNET Koncept is a ‘closed’ IT service private Intranet that runs across China reaching over 1,6002000 universities and 2025 million + Chinese students. As well as its primary role in providing educational material, CERNET Koncept provides value added services including an instant messaging service, e-mailphonecommunication services, a social networking site and access to large amounts of entertainment content available to students only from the Cdream platform. These elements will now be available for advertisers to reach this audience.
According to the Ministry of Education statistics, there are about 27 million university students in China in 2007 and by 2010 the number of university students in China will reach 30 million. A research conducted by Sinomonitor International in 2007 shows that, every university campus student’s average consumption spend is 11,860 Yuan per school year; Total annual university student consumption is nearly 300 billion RMB. The Chinese University Campus has become the battleground for all marketers and business to capture this valuable demographic and future economic engine of China.
ABOUT CERNET KONCEPT
CERNET Koncept Network, Ltd is a joint venture between CERNET (Chinese Educational Research Network) the owner and operator of China’s largest University private network, and Koncept the developer and operator of the Cdream Digital Media Platform. Cdream is an integrated advertising and marketing platform that delivers advertiser supported Communications, Entertainment and Educational Content through Shutter, the free PC application for Students. Cdream Union also aggregates the more than 1,600 University BBS sites for targeted and segmented advertising, and the Cdream Team provides national on campus marketing. CERNET connects nearly 2,000 Universities and 20million Students and Faculty and Cdream is China’s only integrated advertising and marketing.About Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital provides venture capital funding to founders of startups who want to turn business ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bob Swanson of Linear Technology, Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Jen-Hsun Huang of nVIDIA, Michael Marks of Flextronics, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen of YouTube and Dominic Orr and Keerti Melkote of Aruba Wireless Networks. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.
Contact:
Neil Shen
SEQUOIA CAPITAL
nshen@sequoiacap.com
