Writer: Nicholas
Suxian Cloud (云充), a provider of smart sockets for electric bikes, announced a ￥15 million (around $2.3 million) angel plus round this October from Yinxinggu Capital, Qiyi Capital and Duoniu Capital (created by Jiang Haibing, one of the founding members of Alibaba’s Taobao.com and Alipay).
Through its 400-plus city partners, Suxian Cloud has amassed 300,000 users as of now, who use its product once every two days on average. It will use the financing to further improve its technology.
Suxian Cloud offers smart sockets for electric bikes. Powered by IoT technology, the product differs from traditional charging stations in that neither coins nor cards are required to activate the charging process.
Typically, users can plug in and charge their bikes after scanning the QR code on the socket to tie their bank cards and make payments, noted Zhao Lihui, founder of Suxian Cloud. Power is cut off automatically when the purchased charging time expires, he added.
The sockets can be directly installed on the exterior of buildings inside residential communities, taking up less space than traditional charging stations. Moreover, if users tie their WeChat accounts to the service, they will receive notifications from Suxian Cloud whenever their bikes are disconnected or current anomalies are detected.
City partners can check current revenue levels, view revenue history, as well as monitor the usage of devices in real time by logging onto a WeChat-based distribution management system. According to the company, there are already city partners earning over ￥10,000 ( around $1526) a month.
The sockets are mainly installed outside office buildings and supermarkets, as well as around residential communities and universities. It’s learned that Suxian Cloud will soon launch the fourth update to its product and is poised to create more business value by coming up with applications for the large amounts of user traffic and data it has acquired and collected so far.
Suxian Cloud’s core team consists mostly of former employees at Alibaba or IBM, who have years of experience in project development. Zhao Lihui, founder and CEO of the company, was the former sales director of Alibaba China Supplier, the man behind Alibaba’s military-style sales culture, as well as a founding member of Alibaba’s B2B business.