Lamabang Announces Completion of Series D Funding Round with Suning Group as Sole Strategic Investor

In February 2017, Lamasbang, China’s largest mobile maternal and infant community platform, officially announced the completion of its Series D financing round, which was exclusively strategically invested by Suning Group. It is reported that as Lamasbang had already achieved scalable profitability in 2016, its selection of investors focused not only on capital but also, to a greater extent, on the synergistic effects of the investor’s existing resources on the company’s strategic development.

Suning’s exclusive strategic investment in Lamabang represents a deep integration of e-commerce and community platforms, where content, traffic, consumption, services, and sharing will become tightly interconnected. Suning already owns Redbaby, a maternal and infant e-commerce platform acquired in 2012. Driven by the two-child policy, a new wave of consumption for maternal and infant products has emerged. The convergence of maternal and infant e-commerce with community platforms will create a closed-loop consumption ecosystem for high-net-worth consumers.

Regarding post-financing development trends, Jin Zan, founder and CEO of Lama Bang, stated that channel expansion, cross-industry collaboration, and artificial intelligence will become the company’s three new strategic directions. The strategic partnership with Suning will open up broader traffic channels for Lama Bang. By leveraging Suning’s offline store resources to engage more closely with users in physical settings, the collaboration will foster more tangible experiences and interactions, thereby enhancing service delivery. This integration of online and offline operations will generate high-quality traffic reflux.

Lama Bang was founded in December 2011. Initially, it primarily served as a mobile community platform for young mothers to share and exchange insights on parenting and family life. As its user base grew and brand trust accumulated, Lama Bang transitioned to a “community + e-commerce” business model.

In March 2015, Lama Bang announced that it had secured Series C financing led by Vipshop. With Vipshop’s support, Lama Bang’s one-stop online maternal and infant ecosystem, built on a “community + tools + e-commerce” model, enabled rapid industry growth and achieved scaled profitability in 2016. As of December 2016, Lama Bang’s products had amassed 66 million registered users, with nearly 10 million monthly active users on the platform.

This cross-industry collaboration leverages Suning’s distinctive O2O internet retail model, enabling Lamma Bang to achieve deep integration with the Suning.com platform, its Tmall flagship store, over 1,600 city-based internet stores, and nearly 2,000 directly operated stores. Meanwhile, by tapping into Suning’s advantageous resources across its multi-industry layout in cultural creativity, sports, finance, and real estate, Lamma Bang will accelerate its development in channel expansion and cross-sector partnerships.