LinkedIn's China rival Maimai announces $75M Series C; iResearch says Maimai had 30M users as of April, while LinkedIn China claimed 32M users around that time
Maimai, LinkedIn's biggest China rival, just raised $75 million in its latest Series C round and has plans to go IPO in 2019, our sister site is reporting (in Chinese).
Context & Ripple Effects
Maimai's $75M Series C lands at near-parity moment: iResearch counted 30M users as of April, against the ~32M LinkedIn China claimed around the same time — a gap that matters because LinkedIn's global machine was still compounding (433M members and 35% revenue growth in Q1 2016). The round is explicitly framed as runway toward a stated 2019 IPO.
The bet paid forward: within months Maimai closed a $200M Series D led by DST Global with US IPO plans, and its differentiation hardened into an anonymous, Glassdoor-style forum layer that later put it in court fights with China's big tech firms (Protocol's 2021 profile).
First-order effects
- Maimai gets the capital to push past LinkedIn China's ~32M-user claim and fund the 2019 IPO path it has announced.
- LinkedIn China loses the 'largest professional network in China' framing it held when the two were 30M vs 32M — the race is now effectively tied on paper.
Second-order effects
- Follow-on money confirms the thesis: DST Global's $200M Series D within a year signals foreign investors see a credible local winner rather than a LinkedIn satellite.
- China-focused recruiting infrastructure firms like Moka, building talent-acquisition software for 500+ enterprise customers including Xiaomi, gain a richer domestic professional graph to plug into.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to localization beating the global template: Maimai's anonymous forum feature is what sustains engagement where a straight LinkedIn clone stalled, and Microsoft ultimately sunsets the Chinese version of LinkedIn before relaunching a jobs-only InCareer app.
- If the structure holds, professional networking splits into regional champions with distinct product DNA — verified-graph networks in the West, anonymity-heavy communities in China — rather than one platform serving both.
The trend: China's professional networking market is consolidating around locally built platforms whose differentiated features outcompete Western entrants, forcing global players into retreat-and-relaunch strategies.