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Telstra Ventures has made an undisclosed strategic investment in Beijing-based Cloopen, a provider of Chinese communications application programming interfaces (APIs). Matthew Koertge, managing director of Telstra Ventures, said the rationale for the investment was rooted in the robust growth in the APIs and over-the-top (OTT) application sector in China.
Koertge said: “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.
“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,” he added. “It can ease the complexity for application developers to work with multiple telecom operators to equip applications with these communications capabilities.”
While opening up avenues for collaboration with the Telstra Software Group, the investment also allows Telstra to make inroads in the rapidly growing OTT market in China and provides Cloopen access to Telstra’s large customer base in the Asia-Pacific.
Changxun Sun, CEO of Cloopen, said: “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.”
Koertge added: “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.”
