GGV Capital Closes New $625M Fund To Focus On China, U.S. Expansion Stage Investments

GGV — backers of tech giants like Alibaba, Buddy Media, Pandora, Square and Tudou — is gearing up for another big rush of investment activity: today the firm is announcing the closing of a significant new fund, its fourth, totaling $625 million, which it will use for expansion-stage investments in tech companies in both the U.S. and China. There were hints of this fund coming a few days ago, when GGV filed SEC Form D documents raising $508.9 million and $10.8 million. Those are the U.S dollar amounts; an additional sum of 650 million in Chinese yuan takes the total fund up to $625 million.

As with previous funds, GGV plans to keep its investments in the expansion stage, with rounds in the rage of $5 million to $25 million, covering a range of tech companies. It plans to split investments equally between China and the U.S. The last fund raised by GGV was for $610 million in 2007.

The firm’s general partners that are part Fund IV are Jixun Foo, Jenny Lee, Hany Nada, Thomas Ng, Jeff Richards, Glenn Solomon and Fumin Zhuo.  Additional partners in the Chinese yuan part of the fund include Jessie Jin and Bruce Yu.

Recent investments the firm has made have been in the areas of consumer internet services like parent-focused home delivery startup Citrus Lane and cloud music service SoundCloud; but also a number of enterprise and B2B services that include cloud consultancy Appirio and Band Page, which helps musicians create and manage Facebook fan pages.

Since 2010, 13 GGV portfolio companies have completed IPOs since 2010, the company says, with several others making exits as acquisitions by larger tech companies. These have included Buddy Media (Salesforce), Endeca (Oracle), hiSoft (VanceInfo), Qunar (Baidu), and SuccessFactors (SAP).

More to come.