Kingsoft Group's cloud storage subsidiary Kingsoft Cloud has completed its A-round financing of USD20 million.
The investor was Mail.ru, a fund owned by the founder of DST Yuri Milner. Mail.ru invested three times in Facebook and it was once an investor of JD.com, a leading Chinese B2C e-commerce website.
Kingsoft Cloud's financing is reportedly the largest financing case in the early stages of the Chinese cloud storage industry by far. Zhang Hongjiang, chief executive officer of Kingsoft, said that Kingsoft internally considered Kingsoft Cloud as a startup company, including on the capital level. Therefore, they introduced external investments. Kingsoft Cloud reportedly contacted over ten venture capital firms and finally selected Yuri Milner as their partner.
Zhang said the successful completion of the financing was based on the investor's optimism about the development of cloud storage and Kingsoft Cloud.
Kingsoft Cloud was separated and became an independent subsidiary of Kingsoft Group in 2012. Its businesses currently cover cloud service platform, and business and personal cloud storage services. Kingsoft launched cloud storage services in 2010. Statistics showed that by April 2013, the personal version had 45 million users and the number of daily active users reached several million.