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Sogou founder Sogou IPO

Sogou, China's fast-growing, second-largest mobile search provider, gets set to kick off a Nasdaq IPO. The subsidiary of Chinese Internet pioneer Sohu  aims to invest more in artificial intelligence and catch up with its rival Baidu in artificial intelligence, according to CEO Wang Xiaochuan.    The IPO loops in Tencent , Sogou's largest shareholder through a 2013 merger with  Tencent search business Soso and subsequent investment that raised its stake in Sogou to 40 percent. It was 12 years ago that Baidu went public on Nasdaq, when AI was not hot and neither was mobile. 

Here we go again! Profit is taking a backseat to growth for the Chinese bike-sharing market, as investors pump billions into leading players Ofo and Mobike to fuel rapid expansion plans in overseas markets. Plus new entrants keep coming such as Hong Kong's  Gobee that just raised $9 million to take on the unicorns! 
See Forbes : Keep pedaling
The race is on to see which one can ramp up the quickest and still survive. Lots of VC is at stake. 
 
M&A DEALS
Spacemob founder
WeWork is acquiring Singapore's Spacemob to angle into the bustling Southeast Asian co-working market. In on the return are Vertex VC and Alpha JWC Ventures, which put in seed money of $5.5 million just last December. 
See Spacemob founder Turochas "T" Fuad (above), set up the WeWork clone in 2016 and now becomes WeWork's Southeast Asia general manager.
U.S.-listed tech company Snap Inc. is reportedly in acquisition talks with China-based drone maker Zero Zero Robotics, best known for the Hover Camera drone designed for taking aerial selfies, for a deal in the range of $150 million to $200 million.

Anbang, the Chinese conglomerate whose U.S. holdings include the Waldorf Astoria hotel,
has been asked by Chinese regulators to sell its assets outside of China, per Bloomberg. But on WeChat, Anbang said it has no plans to sell.   

FUNDS
Blue Lake Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in Shanghai led by former Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital execs, is seeking to raise $200 million for its second fund, investing in consumer and enterprise Internet sectors.
TECH TRENDS
Baidu and PayPal have partnered so that Chinese users of Baidu Wallet can now make payments to PayPal's 17 million U.S. and international merchants. This is one more e-wallet prompt for China's big-city, cash-less generation. 
INDIA
Jon Medved
India and Israel are going to collaborate on startups. Maybe it's about time more investors see beyond China.
OurCrowd sees big opportunities to invest in Indian startups as founder Jon Medved (above) visits this Silicon Tiger market. In quick order, India's Reliance Group has partnered with OurCrowd to create a high-tech incubator in Jerusalem and OurCrowd is now collaborating with India's crowd-funding platform Let's Venture to fund both Israeli and Indian startups. This follows OurCrowd's first investment in India, last December, in Bangalore ride-sharing startup ZoomCar

AFRICA
Taxify, an Uber-like service that operates in Europe and Africa, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from China's expansion-oriented  Didi Chuxing.

NOTEWORTHY
Finding the Silicon Valley of the East: Has China become an ideal destination for global entrepreneurs?  
China Tech Insights with insightful quote from:
"Foreign leadership is normally alien to the Chinese market while headquarters normally would not be comfortable with a too-localized Chinese CEO. This contradiction has led to a lot of problems. "

How U.S. tech giant Qualcomm is backing China's tech ambitions. NYT

  Amazon has followed Apple in implementing China's ban on virtual private network software to bypass the Great Firewall. Amazon Web Services' partner in China instructed cloud-computing customers to delete illegal VPNs, less than a week after Apple removed VPNs from its app store in China. Do these moves signal other US companies? Probably.
  
The market cap for Tencent and Alibaba are both creeping up to $400 billion. Only three years ago, the  WSJ noted that Tencent surpassed $150 billion, surpassing Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard.


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