Ventech China's A-round Portfolio, sports technology company Keep has recently completed USD 360 million F round of financing, with a post-investment valuation of over USD 2 billion, which is double the USD 1 billion valuation of Keep in the last round of financing in May 2020. This round of financing was led by the SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund, followed by Hillhouse Capital, Coatue Capital and other old shareholders, including GGV, Tencent, 5Y Capital, Jeneration Capital, and BAI Capital.

Ventech China made two consecutive rounds of capital injection since Keep’s Series A round of financing in 2015. Its historical institutional investors include BAI, GGV, 5Y Capital and Tencent. During the 6 years since its launch on February 4, 2015, Keep has accumulated 8 rounds of financing and obtained more than USD 600 million.

2020 is a year for Keep reorganizing its strategy and clarifying the different stages of different businesses. For example, the offline sports space Keepland will not expand on a large scale for the time being until it explores a new business model. Consumer goods business including smart spinning bikes, treadmills, and healthy food will still be the focus of subsequent commercialization.

(Keepland, Source: Keep)

The reason behind the rapid growth in valuation in this round of financing is mainly the prosperity of the domestic fitness scenes since 2020, which has directly driven the increase in the number of Keep users. At the same time, its revenue pillar consumer goods business has achieved good growth. According to the official figures, the number of App users of Keep has exceeded 300 million; and the number of paid members has exceeded 10 million.

Continuously optimizing contents of online sports was Keep’s focus in 2020-in addition to more than 1,200 self-developed courses, it has also introduced super sports experts such as Pamela and Saturday Wild, and achieved progress in the exploration of brand copyrights, introducing well-known oversea sports content IPs such as Zumba and Lesmills.

(Pamela on Keep, Source: Sohu)

With the popularity of live streaming, Keep has also established a live stream interactive team of nearly 100 people including course designers, live coaches, and brokerage operations. For the new career of live coach, Keep launches a long-term training plan and establishes an integrated development path. During six months of development, the live coaching team has attracted millions of fans.

(Live Coach, Source: Keep)

The trilateral growth of live coaches, PUGC content creators and users has made Keep's "platform" strategy clearer.

In terms of commercialization, Keep’s self-developed sports products has achieved good performance in sales. For example, Keep has launched products such as smart spinning bikes, which ranks top 1 among products of the same category during Tmall D11 2020.

(Smart spinning bikes on Tmall, Source: Sina)

Up to now, Keep's annual sales of consumer good sports products have achieved an annual growth of 100%, making it a cutting-edge domestic sports product brand. After this round of financing, Keep will iteratively upgrade smart hardware such as treadmills and sports bracelets in 2021, continuing to optimize the category of small sports equipment and launch healthy food which are more in line with the stomachs of Chinese consumers.