The world’s most valuable startup ByteDance has officially launched its online collaboration suite Lark targeting clients outside China, the company told KrAsia today.
The move, which is part of its recent push towards China’s enterprise SaaS market through self-developed products and acquisitions, also marks the Beijing-based company’s first major attempt at the global online collaboration tools market.
It just acquired Mubu, an online outliner tool similar to WorkFlowy, KrAsia reported last week.
According to Lark’s official website, the office suite so far provides functions including online communication, a web-based calender, and a cloud-based collaborative document platform. The company claimed in a release that Lark’s sweet spot is its seamless integration of the aforementioned three functions and the effortlessness in navigating and switching among them.
ByteDance said it will also soon launch the domestic version of the suites, dubbed Feishu, meaning flying books in English. Chinese online workspace market is filled with fierce competition with big names like Alibaba backed DingTalk and Tencent’s Enterprise WeChat. The market is estimated to be reaching RMB50 billion (link in Chinese), or USD7.5 billion, by 2020 per a joint report by DingTalk and CBNData, a market intelligence service.
Contact the writer Jingli@kr-Asia.com