Cycling app Voyager has completed a multi-million RMB Series A financing with investments from Hushan Capital and Yinxingu Capital. It will use the funds for software and hardware development and upgrading, social community marketing and to expand its ecommerce.
Basic Conception's smart bike and Voyager app offer an integrated urban cycling experience
Voyager is a cycling app developed by Shanghai-based Basic Conception. Cyclists can use the latest version of the app to look up data of their cycling trip such as speed, distance traveled, time spent on the sport, elevation of the location, slope angle as well as calorie consumption. They can also use the built-in road maps as a navigator and for route comparing.
The app has so far accumulated close to three million users and has been downloaded over 10 million times. Its users have cycled a total of 160 million kilometers in total distance. Basic Conception has also launched the Qizi smart bike under the company’s BiCi smart bike brand. In short, the Voyager app adopts a comprehensive hardware, software and online model.
As a functional software product, Voyager’s business model leverages its social community to gather cycling enthusiasts to sell its smart bikes and related merchandise for profit. Users can exchange reward points earned for distance covered in cycling routes recorded with the app. The users can then use the reward points to exchange for merchandise and coupons available on Voyager’s official Taobao online store. “We not only do this to drive traffic to our ecommerce but also to increase the numbers and frequency of activity of our app users,” founder Minchen Jiang said.
Voyager plans to develop in a number of areas in the future. In its mid-stage development, it will develop more original products for ecommerce. For example in October, it launched a Bluetooth pedal counter for RMB77 and the initial sale of the product surpassed the monthly online turnover of similar products. Voyager also aims to collaborate with offline stores, clubs and cycling competitions to increase traffic for the app.
“Our originally designed smart bike comes with a complete tracking system. It is like a big data information database of users’ cycling patterns, and the information can be shared and used for analysis,” Mr. Jiang said. “For example, products like Baidu Map are more for recording automobile trip data, yet our system has an edge in gleaning cycling trip data, and such information is valuable for delivering comprehensive geographic data,” he said.（Translation by David)
