Meishubao, a company that develops and operates an art education platform, recently announces its C+ round of financing with 40 million US dollars. This round is led by Tencent, with Shunwei Capital and Bluerun Ventures also participating.

After this deal, the company has achieved a total amount of financing with 800 million yuan. And the latest fund will be used to explore more online scenarios of competency-based education. In the near future, Meishubao will also focus on product upgrades, course development, and talent recruitment.

Founded in 2014, Meishubao has become a subsidiary under its mother company 17ms Group. The other two brands provide early childhood art education and a platform for training institutions’ management and operation. The whole business has witnessed an overall monthly revenue of nearly 200 million, which continues to grow.

According to Meishubao’s research, around 50% of its students have never paid for offline courses, due to poor quality and that the institutions are far from home. Therefore, Gan Ling, the founder and CEO of 17ms Group, regards the online art education market as a vast, incremental market opportunity that could move the needle for players in this sector.

“At the current stage, there are around 300,000 offline art education institutions in the Chinese market, and each institution has at least one or two hundred students. However, amid COVID-19 pandemic, offline businesses are hard to resume. Thus we will meet a long-time growth in the future.” Said Gan Ling.