Telstra Ventures invests in Chinese PaaS player Cloopen

Telstra Ventures has made a strategic investment in Beijing-based Cloopen, a provider of Chinese communications application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable developers to easily integrate messaging functions, video and voice calls in their applications. The investment increases Telstra’s exposure to the rapidly growing OTT market in China and gives Cloopen access to Telstra’s large customer base in the Asia-Pacific. It also creates opportunities for collaboration with the Telstra Software Group.

Matthew Koertge, Managing Director Telstra Ventures, said the investment has been driven by the strong growth in the APIs and over-the-top (OTT) application sector in China. “With the complex nature of the telecommunications infrastructure in China and different local policies and business practices in each province, Cloopen meets the need among application developers for simplified communications capabilities,” he said.

“As a platform-as-a-service provider (PaaS), Cloopen can easily integrate a set of communications APIs into applications that provide services such as car-hailing or meal delivery, which are booming in China, to enable functions like application-to-people voice and messaging, two-factor verification, and videoconferencing. It can ease the complexity for application developers to work with multiple telecom operators to equip applications with these communications capabilities.”

Koertge further pointed out that Cloopen is the only Internet-based cloud communication PaaS provider with the breadth of communications capabilities in China that it offers. "Currently, more than 150,000 registered developers, including Tencent and Alibaba, are using the platform to build their applications,” said Koertge.

Changxun Sun, CEO of Cloopen, welcomed the investment from Telstra as the company is expanding regionally and globally and into different industry sectors. “Having experienced a rapid growth in customer numbers and revenue in 2015, Cloopen is committed to continuous expansion within China. We are also looking to leverage Telstra’s network to grow our customer base in Australia and across Asia-Pacific. The cloud communication platform market is estimated to more than triple to US$4.5 billion by 2021, and there are no doubt plenty of opportunities for us to work with Telstra to drive software innovation to a broader client base,” said Sun.