Kindergarten communication system provider Zhang Tong Jia Yuan (ZTJY) has raised $100 million in Series D funding. Centurium Capital, a fund set up by Li Hui, the ex-APAC president of Warburg Pincus, led the round.
Proceeds will be used to develop ZTJY's platform and to increase message efficiency. The startup will also help to build a training platform for kindergarten principals.
ZTJY was founded in 2011 as a video surveillance company. It launched its kindergarten surveillance app three years later. The app allows parents to access video surveillance in the kindergarten, and to communicate with teachers directly.
Chinese parents are heavily involved in their children’s education and are willing to devote time and money to it. Since the relaxation of the country's second-child policy, the number of children has been rising steadily. Last year 17.2 million babies were born in China, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.
Kindergarten numbers in China have steadily increased since 2013 and are expected to rise 16% to 294,000 this year.
As it is difficult to register with cheap public kindergartens, private nurseries take most children in China. This year, for example, private kindergartens are expected to take 2.69 million children while public kindergartens take around 2.18 million.
The quality of Chinese kindergarten principals has given parents cause for concern, especially after a high-profile child abuse scandal in a Beijing nursery owned by Nasdaq-listed RYB Education last year. Parents are increasingly keen to monitor their children’s behaviour at kindergarten in real time, and ZTJY wants to grab the opportunity.
According to the company, ZTJY now covers 80,000 nurseries, while about 30 million parents and 1 million kindergarten teachers use the app. Its weekly active parent numbers hit 8.9 million in November, which makes up almost two-thirds of those who use kindergarten monitoring system, according to data platform Quest Mobile.
And ZTJY aims for wider applications of its system. It intends to sell children products via its platform and has signed cooperation agreements with education company New Oriental and audio site Ximalaya.com.
Previously, the startup raised Rmb500 million ($72.8 million) in six rounds of funding from Zhen Fund, Qualcomm, New Oriental Education and Cybernaut.
