Five Years Ago, Nobody Was Talking About FinTech in China.

Back in October 2011, at a Lightspeed-hosted dinner with some of China’s leading entrepreneurs, I was talking with a close friend of mine, Chenchao Zhuang (Co-Founder and CEO of Qunar, a leading online travel company in China). Zhuang and I have a lot in common — from graduating from the same high school in Shanghai, to agreeing on the biggest future opportunities for startups in China.

One opportunity that we were both thinking of and discussed at length — the big potential for an internet search and recommendation platform for financial products. In 2011, nobody was even talking about Fintech in China, but we believed as the Chinese economy transforms from fixed-asset investment driven, to more consumption driven, financial services will need to significantly increase their offerings and availability, and internet search and recommendation platform for such services will play a big role.

I was very excited to find out that night that Zhuang’s three friends — David Ye, Jiayan Lu, and Caofeng Liu — were just starting to work on this idea, and I knew most of them. Ye’s experience at Paypal and Capital One, Lu’s banking background, and Liu’s tech and product knowledge from Baidu gave these three founders unique insight and experience to innovate in the fintech space.

The three founders were working out of a small apartment in a residential quarter near the south gate of Tsinghua University, and I quickly went to visit them. In that small apartment, we started working on the business plan together, and Lightspeed China Partners provided an initial loan.

These were the humble beginnings of Rong360 Inc., now China’s largest independent financial products search and recommendation platform. The initial public offering of Jianpu Technology, Inc., a subsidiary of Rong360, takes place today on the New York Stock Exchange.

From being the first institutional investor and leading the Series A financing, to subsequently investing in the follow-on Series B and Series C rounds, it’s been an amazing journey.

Today in 2017, Rong360 has become a leading platform for consumers and businesses to easily search and get recommendation for a variety of financial products, including consumer and other loans, credit cards, and wealth management products. It has over 95 million monthly active users, and offers more than 170,000 financial products from over 2,500 financial service providers nationwide on its platform.

Platforms like Rong360 will play a big role in the evolution of Fintech in China, and we look forward to what the future holds for Jianpu Technology!

— James Mi, Founding Partner, Lightspeed China Partners

*Jainpu Technology, Inc., is a subsidiary of Rong360, Inc.