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
Context & Ripple Effects
Maimai's $75M Series C lands at the moment third-party researcher iResearch puts it at 30M users as of April — statistically neck-and-neck with the 32M LinkedIn China itself claimed around the same time. That parity is striking given LinkedIn entered China with global scale behind it, having reported 433M members worldwide just over a year earlier.
The round set up what came next: within months Maimai closed a $200M Series D led by DST Global with US IPO plans, and by 2021 it had differentiated into a Glassdoor-style anonymous forum that put it in court against China's tech firms — while LinkedIn ultimately sunset its Chinese version and relaunched as the jobs-only InCareer app.
First-order effects
- Maimai gains fresh capital to press its user-count advantage against LinkedIn China, whose claimed 32M lead over iResearch's 30M figure no longer reads as dominance.
- LinkedIn China now faces a well-funded domestic rival competing on local product fit rather than importing the global LinkedIn playbook.
Second-order effects
- China's recruiting-adjacent startup ecosystem gets a validation signal — Moka's later $27M Series B for enterprise talent acquisition shows investors funding the layers around professional networking, not just the networks themselves.
- LinkedIn is pushed toward structural retreat rather than feature competition, culminating in shutting down the full Chinese service and relaunching the narrower InCareer jobs app.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to global social platforms ceding China's professional-graph market to localized players whose differentiators — like Maimai's anonymous workplace forum — are precisely the features global platforms can't or won't copy.
- If Maimai's court fights over anonymous content hold, content-moderation liability becomes the binding constraint on how far Glassdoor-style models can scale inside China's tech industry.
The trend: China's professional networking market is consolidating around locally built platforms while global entrants retreat from full-service products to narrow job-listing apps.