Telstra Ventures invests in leading Chinese communications API provider Cloopen

Telstra Ventures invests in leading
Chinese communications API provider Cloopen

8 July 2016, SINGAPORE – Telstra Ventures today announced
a strategic investment in Beijing-based Cloopen, a leading provider of Chinese
communications application programming interfaces (APIs) that enables
developers to easily integrate messaging functions, video and voice calls in
their applications.

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,” said Mr Koertge.

“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 video
conferencing. It can ease the complexity for application developers to work
with multiple telecom operators to equip applications with these communications
capabilities,” said Mr Koertge.

“Cloopen
is the only internet-based cloud communication PaaS provider with this breadth
of communications capabilities in China. Currently, more than 150,000
registered developers, including Tencent and Alibaba, are using the platform to
build their applications,” said Mr Koertge.

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.

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 Mr Sun.

ENDS