About Lieyunwang

Lieyunwang

Lieyunwang, published at lieyunwang.com and translated as Hunting Cloud Network, is a Beijing technology and startup news outlet founded in 2013. CB Insights describes its business in one sentence: Lieyunwang provides online reporting on technology opinions, news and analysis, and it also helps startups with fundraising. That combination — journalism plus a fundraising service for the companies it covers — places Lieyunwang in the generation of Chinese venture media that emerged in the early 2010s, when the country's startup boom created demand for outlets that could both report on young companies and connect them to capital. Its recorded investors include Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Horus Capital, N5 Capital and others, and its latest recorded financing stage is a Series B second tranche. Lieyunwang's headquarters are in Beijing.

Founding in 2013 and the Beijing base

Lieyunwang was founded in 2013, according to CB Insights' company record, which also places its headquarters in Beijing. The date situates it in a specific cohort: China's mobile-internet startup wave was cresting, venture funding was expanding beyond the first generation of portals, and a set of new media brands — Lieyunwang in 2013, Pencil News in 2015 — were founded to cover the boom from inside it, joining older institutions such as Cyzone, founded in 2007, and the Zero2IPO group's Pedaily. Beijing was the natural base: the capital concentrates China's venture funds, its leading technology companies' headquarters functions and the Zhongguancun innovation district. A hunting metaphor in the name — lieyun suggests hunting clouds, rendered by the company in English as Hunting Cloud — evokes both cloud computing, the era's defining technology theme, and the hunt for deals and stories in a fast market.

Editorial offer: opinions, news and analysis

The outlet's stated editorial offer has three parts: technology opinions, news and analysis. Opinion distinguishes Lieyunwang from a pure news-wire model; the site publishes viewpoints on technology and startup questions, not only reports of events. News covers the daily movement of China's technology industry — company launches, product developments, funding rounds and executive moves. Analysis interprets those movements for readers deciding where the market is going. Together the three genres address the working needs of its audience of founders, investors and technology professionals: what happened, what it means and what informed people think about it. This is the standard repertoire of venture media worldwide, and Lieyunwang's longevity since 2013 indicates it found a readership for the Chinese-language version of it at a time when the country's startup output was generating more stories than the older media could absorb.

Helping startups with fundraising

The second half of Lieyunwang's recorded description — it also helps startups with fundraising — is the feature that separates venture media from general technology media. An outlet that introduces the companies it covers to investors monetises its scouting: its reporters encounter young companies early, and that early knowledge is valuable to capital. The model creates the familiar tension of the genre, between reporting on companies and servicing them, which Chinese outlets of this generation managed in different ways; Pencil News, for example, made verified truthful reporting its explicit brand promise. For Lieyunwang, the fundraising service is openly part of the company description carried by international databases, presenting the outlet as a participant in the market it covers — a posture typical of China's 2010s startup media, in which media, community and capital services were routinely combined under one brand, as they were at Cyzone with its angel fund and events, and at Zero2IPO with its matching platform.

Financing and investors

Lieyunwang is itself venture financed. CB Insights records its latest funding round as a Series B second tranche — recorded as "Series B - II" — and lists investors including Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Horus Capital, N5 Capital, Pintu360 and TED Entrepreneurship, among others. The presence of Lenovo Capital, the investment arm associated with the Lenovo ecosystem, among its backers connects the outlet to one of China's largest technology companies' investment activity. A Series B-stage media company is a substantial organisation by the standards of vertical publishing: it implies the outlet passed the seed and Series A tests of audience and revenue that end most specialist media ventures. As with its peers, the investor list also maps the outlet's network — the funds and corporate investors behind it are drawn from the same community its pages cover.

Audience: founders, investors and technology readers

Lieyunwang's audience can be reconstructed from its offer. Founders read it to follow their market, to be discovered and, through its fundraising service, to meet capital. Investors read it as scouting and as a check on the market's mood, expressed in its opinion and analysis pages. Technology professionals read it as trade press. This three-sided readership is the economic foundation of venture media: each constituency values the attention of the other two, and the outlet that holds all three can sell media, events and services to each. The company's description in international databases — online reporting on technology opinions, news and analysis, plus fundraising help for startups — is written precisely for that market of founders and funders, and its Beijing headquarters places the newsroom where all three constituencies are densest in China.

Position in China's venture-media field

China's venture-media field, as documented in this directory, spans research institutes such as ChinaVenture (2005), integrated platforms such as Cyzone (2007) and the listed Zero2IPO group's Pedaily, and the younger founder-focused outlets of the 2010s. Lieyunwang belongs to the younger cohort, and its profile in international databases is correspondingly focused: where ChinaVenture is defined by its CVSource database and Cyzone by DEMO China and its services stack, Lieyunwang is defined by reporting plus fundraising assistance. The comparison shows the field's division of labour by the mid-2010s: data, institutions and events at the established end; discovery, voice and founder services at the insurgent end. Lieyunwang's survival from 2013 through multiple funding rounds to a Series B second tranche marks it as one of the durable members of that younger cohort, in a segment where many titles launched in the boom years did not outlast them.

The name and brand

Brand names in Chinese venture media often carry programmatic meaning: Cyzone is Chuangyebang, the entrepreneurship gang; Pencil News is Qianbidao, the pencil road; Pedaily is Touzijie, the investment world. Lieyunwang — the hunting cloud network — fits the pattern, yoking the era's emblematic technology, the cloud, to the predatory energy of the deal hunt. The English rendering Hunting Cloud Network, used in English-language references to the company, preserves the metaphor for international databases. A name that promises to hunt — for stories, for companies, for capital — tells founders and investors alike what the outlet believes its job is: not passive recording but active pursuit within China's technology market. Brand archaeology of this kind is a reliable guide to the self-image of China's 2010s startup press, and Lieyunwang's name is among its most evocative.

Coverage in international records

Lieyunwang appears in international company databases primarily through CB Insights, whose profile supplies the core public facts: founded 2013, headquarters Beijing, description of reporting and fundraising services, latest round Series B - II, and the investor list. That a Chinese-language outlet maintains a profile in the database used by global investors reflects its subject matter: it covers the market those investors study, and is tracked as one of the market's companies in its own right. Its listed competitors and comparators in the same database — TechNode, Pencil News, GeekPark, Cyzone — draw the map of Beijing-centred technology and startup media as international analysts see it. Within that map, Lieyunwang is the fundraising-linked reporter: the outlet whose description makes the media-to-capital pipeline explicit.

Why outlets like Lieyunwang emerged

Lieyunwang's existence is explained by the scale of what it covers. China's startup formation in the 2010s reached a volume at which general business media could not report the early-stage market company by company; specialist outlets arose to do the discovery work, and venture capital's own growth funded them, both as advertisers and services clients and, in cases like Lieyunwang's, as shareholders. The same cycle explains the fundraising service: in a market with thousands of young companies and thousands of funds, matching is scarce and valuable, and a newsroom's reporting is a matching engine. Lieyunwang, founded 2013, is a product of that structural moment, and its record — a decade-plus run, institutional investors including a Lenovo-linked fund, financing reaching a second Series B tranche — shows the model working at a sustainable scale for a Beijing specialist outlet.

Significance

Lieyunwang's significance is representative as much as individual. It embodies the second generation of Chinese venture media: founded in Beijing in 2013 to publish technology opinions, news and analysis, and to help the startups it covered raise money; backed by investors including Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Horus Capital and N5 Capital; and financed through to a Series B second tranche. In the landscape recorded by this directory — where Pedaily speaks for funds, ChinaVenture measures the market and Cyzone convenes it — Lieyunwang stands for the discovery press of the boom years, the outlets that hunted new companies through the cloud of the mobile-internet era and wrote the first draft of their stories.