About IT Juzi

IT Juzi

IT Juzi, also written ITJuzi and translated as 'IT Orange' from its Chinese name IT Juzi (IT桔子), is a Beijing-based structured database and business information service for China's technology, media and telecoms (TMT) and new-economy start-up sector. Founded in May 2013 and headquartered on Haidian Street in Beijing's Haidian District, it is often described as a Crunchbase for China: it systematically records start-up company profiles, founding teams, products, funding rounds, investors and mergers and acquisitions for users working in investment, acquisition and competitive intelligence. Its annual venture-capital and unicorn reports are widely cited in Chinese and international coverage of China's start-up economy.

Founding and backers

IT Juzi was founded in 2013 — May 2013 in the company's own profile information — in Beijing, the centre of China's technology industry. CB Insights records its headquarters at No. 3, Haidian Street, Haidian District, and lists its investors as IDG Capital, China Renaissance, Northern Light Capital and Microsoft ScaleUp, with total funding of about US$2 million recorded. Those backers are themselves significant names in Chinese technology investment, and their presence reflected the database's position inside the venture ecosystem it documents: the platform's natural customers — venture capital firms, corporate development teams and founders — were also its community.

What the database records

IT Juzi describes itself as a structured Chinese TMT start-ups database and business information service provider, committed to the production, aggregation, mining and processing of information and data. Where general business-information platforms such as Tianyancha and Qichacha record every registered company, IT Juzi's focus is narrower and deeper: the new-economy start-up sector. Its records cover company profiles, founding teams, products, financing rounds, investors and M&A events, organised so that users can follow a company from founding through successive fundings to acquisition or public listing, and can map investors' portfolios and co-investment relationships. The stated purpose is to help users and customers save time and money, improve efficiency, and support business behaviour including investment, acquisition, competitive intelligence and sub-sector industry research.

Early reports: the geography of Chinese start-ups

IT Juzi was publishing analytical reports from its database within its first year. Its report on 2013 data, covered by TechNode in January 2014, recorded 854 investment cases distributed across 20 regions including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou — a more scattered pattern than the 13 regions recorded for 2012. The same analysis found that 97 percent of internet start-ups were distributed across the top ten technology bases — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Fujian, Hubei, Taiwan and Shanxi — up from 94 percent in 2012, and that while Beijing still dominated the tech scene, second- and third-tier cities were attracting increasing attention from start-ups. That combination — a structured national database plus regular published analysis — established IT Juzi's dual identity as both a data product and a research voice on the Chinese start-up economy.

The 'start-up winter' diagnosis

IT Juzi's data also shaped debate when the market turned. Its '2017 Semi-annual Report: China Venture Capital Trend', produced with Tencent News' technology channel, found that the number of new start-ups in China in the first half of 2017 had fallen sharply — by 74 percent compared with the same period a year earlier. Reporting the findings, chief executive Li Jingwang argued that the winter China's tech scene faced was not a 'capital winter' on the investor side but a 'start-up winter' on the asset side — a shortage of fundable new companies rather than of money. The distinction, drawn directly from the database's founding and funding records, was widely reported and illustrated the platform's role as an evidence base in arguments about the direction of the whole venture market.

Unicorn tracking

IT Juzi's unicorn lists became one of its best-known products. Its 2017 list counted 34 new Chinese unicorns — companies less than ten years old valued at US$1 billion or more. Analysing that cohort, IT Juzi found the new unicorns came from 11 vertical industries, with cultural entertainment, business services and vehicles the top three sectors; that the first half of 2017 had seen rental-economy start-ups gain prominence, from bike rentals and power-bank rentals to more eccentric offers; and that the time from founding to unicorn status ranged from 17 months for Cambricon, which passed through angel, pre-A and A rounds to reach a billion-dollar valuation, to 105 months for Shanghai-based Chubao — with most new unicorns, 76 percent, taking between two and six years. Two companies, Mobike and Zhuanzhuan, entered the unicorn club within two years of founding. Such cohort analysis turned the database from a lookup tool into a source of benchmarks for founders and investors.

Annual venture reports and AI-era data

With partners including China Renaissance Capital Investment and Tencent News Technology Channel, IT Juzi produces annual 'China Venture Capital' and entrepreneurship-and-investment reports that are widely cited in coverage of the sector. Its data continued to anchor reporting into the artificial-intelligence era: its figures showed 530 AI funding events worth 63.1 billion yuan in the first eleven months of 2023, a 26 percent year-on-year drop in event count that was quoted in international coverage of Chinese AI investment. Its dataset on Chinese AI entrepreneurs — covering the educational and employment backgrounds of about 6,500 founders and senior managers, with education information for about 2,000 and employment histories for about 1,400 — has been used in academic research, including a study of which firms cultivate the most Chinese AI entrepreneurs, which found Baidu the large technology company that had produced the most, with 209 AI entrepreneurs. That academic reuse, with its stated caveats about selection bias toward founders who publicly disclose prestigious backgrounds, shows the database functioning as research infrastructure beyond its commercial user base.

Users and place in the data ecosystem

IT Juzi's users work in investment, acquisition and competitive intelligence: venture and private-equity investors screening sectors and tracking rounds, corporate teams mapping potential acquisition targets and competitors, and founders and journalists benchmarking the market. Guides to start-up scouting in China list it as a leading venture-capital database offering detailed company information, key performance indicators, investor networks and funding rounds, and describe it as having become an indispensable tool in the Chinese start-up scene. Within China's data industry it occupies the specialist, sector-vertical position — deep on TMT and the new economy rather than universal in coverage — alongside the generalist corporate registries and the financial-data providers.

IT Juzi today

More than a decade after its 2013 founding, IT Juzi remains defined by the same formula it started with: structured, continuously updated records of Chinese start-ups, their teams, products and financings, published analysis that interprets those records for the market, and flagship annual products — the venture-capital reports and the unicorn lists — that made its name a citation in its own right. In a venture market that expanded, cooled and re-formed around new sectors such as artificial intelligence, the database's long, consistent time series is its principal asset: it can show not only where Chinese start-up investment is, but how it got there.

The durability of that model is notable in an industry where databases are frequently absorbed or superseded. CB Insights continues to profile IT Juzi as a structured TMT start-up database whose latest recorded funding status reflects an acquisition exit, yet its reports — from the 2013 regional investment geography to the 2023 artificial-intelligence funding counts — remain the citations through which its data lives in public and academic debate.