Chapter 125

The next morning, as soon as Chen Yansen arrived at the startup park, he called Lin Chenfeng from Penguin Investment, Zhang Suyang from IDG Venture Capital, and Zhang Jiancheng from Siwei Capital.

Chen Yansen's message was straightforward: he wanted to sell 5% of FoxTao's equity.

"Mr. Chen, I'll first communicate with Martin and contact you again once I have news." Lin Chenfeng's implication was clear—he would go consult Liu Zhiping to see if they'd accept the 5% equity.

Zhang Suyang and Zhang Jiancheng gave similar replies: both showed strong interest in the 5% equity but needed to reevaluate FoxTao's current business scale before determining a purchase price.

Chen Yansen didn't take it seriously—he was just going through the motions to notify them; the news would inevitably leak out anyway.

That afternoon, several domestic venture capital firms specializing in e-commerce began receiving whispers.

The news that FoxTao's founder intended to sell 5% equity immediately drew considerable attention.

In the guide-commerce sector, FoxTao was far ahead of everyone else.

It left Meili Shuo, Mushroom Street, and What's Worth Buying far behind; the latter could only scavenge scraps.

In the first quarter alone, it achieved 1.5 billion yuan in sales (actual: 1.29 billion), and set a full-year sales target of 10 billion yuan—if achieved, its sales and profitability would rank second only to Mama Ali and JD. com domestically, even surpassing Yihaodian and Dangdang.

Thus, interested venture capital firms began submitting offers.

Using the user-value valuation method, FoxTao currently had 3 million daily active users, with each active user estimated to generate 500–1000 yuan in profit, placing its valuation between 1.5 and 3 billion yuan.

But FoxTao's Series A valuation had already reached 2.8 billion yuan, so Chen Yansen hung up on any VC offering less than 3 billion yuan.

After all, these people were throwing out numbers without thinking; Chen Yansen didn't expect them to make any genuinely sincere offers.

Using the price-to-sales ratio method, with current daily sales of 30 million yuan, annual sales were projected at 10 billion yuan; applying the e-commerce industry's average 1.5–2x price-to-sales ratio, the valuation ranged between 15 and 20 billion yuan.

However, guide-commerce differed significantly from true comprehensive e-commerce platforms.

Most VCs still saw potential in FoxTao's growth but believed its ceiling was limited.

The highest valuation offered was only 10 billion yuan!

Even more frugal VCs used traditional industry discounted cash flow methods and offered a 7.2 billion yuan valuation.

Chen Yansen preferred the price-to-earnings ratio method, taking an average multiplier of 20; with annual profits of 600 million yuan, a 12 billion yuan valuation from VCs would be reasonable.

But regardless of the calculation logic or valuation model used, all estimates exceeded 6 billion yuan, proving FoxTao had already achieved unicorn-level corporate strength.

Chen Yansen and the VCs engaged in mutual probing.

A week later, the truly interested venture capital firms emerged: Sequoia, IDG Venture Capital, and Augusta Capital.

Among them, Augusta showed the greatest interest and made the most sincere offer!

They had originally been evaluating Ebates (the pioneer of cashback services) and were preparing to invest when they learned a guide-commerce platform with even faster growth had emerged in the Asian market.

Founded for less than a year, its annual sales were projected to exceed 1.5 billion U. S. dollars.

This instantly sparked their interest!

So, after investing $40 million in Ebates, Augusta's team immediately rushed to Hui'an, took a high-speed train, and headed straight for Xu Yuan.

Upon hearing the news, Chen Yansen smiled faintly, thinking: It seems American investment firms really know how to spend money.

Perhaps they were more familiar with and trusted this business model after dealing with Ebates.

Chen Yansen knew well: unless he could take FoxTao public on NASDAQ within two years, any investor would inevitably lose money.

Penguin weighed the options, decided FoxTao's valuation was inflated, and concluded further investment offered insufficient returns—they withdrew first.

Siwei Capital faced a similar situation; they were small-scale and preferred high-risk, high-reward bets, deemed it uneconomical, and gave up their purchase rights.

Mama Ali's Ma Liyun showed strong interest, but his funds were tied up repurchasing Yahoo's 40% equity—he wanted to but couldn't, and also withdrew.

May 9th, 1:00 p. m.

On the first floor of the startup park, Chen Yansen met Augusta's investment team; aside from one Chinese translator, they were all Lightlanders, confirming Augusta Capital had no office in Asia.

Their willingness to invest was likely due to strong confidence in the future of the guide-commerce model.

But Chen Yansen knew: the guide-commerce model had no future!

"Mr. Chen, this is Augusta's investment manager Jody—he handled the $40 million financing deal for Ebates."

The translator politely introduced the middle-aged white man beside him.

"Hello, Mr. Chen, I'm Jody, it's really hard to imagine that the founder of Fox Tao is so young."

Jody, sporting a balding crown and dressed in a bespoke navy-blue suit, enthusiastically extended his right hand.

The translator was about to translate Jody's words for Chen Yansen.

But Chen Yansen stepped forward directly, gripped Jody's hand, sized up the "sucker" from head to toe, then fluently greeted him in English and invited him upstairs for a tour.

The translator froze for a moment, then secretly rejoiced: these foreigners were paying anyway—why should they work? Just collecting money was awesome.

Jody was stunned—he hadn't expected Chen Yansen's English to be this good, with pure American pronunciation and zero accent.

Chen Yansen led Jody and the others upstairs; the first person to be dumbfounded was Wang Zihao.

He knew Chen Yansen too well: he'd scored only 80 on his college entrance English exam, the most patriotic kid in Class 8 of Senior 3, guessing vocabulary and guessing listening comprehension.

Was this guy chatting effortlessly with foreigners really Chen Yansen?

Wang Zihao was filled with questions.

He'd often seen Chen Yansen reading books and watching original-language films, but this progress was absurd.

Augusta's team included investment analysts, industry experts, financial and legal advisors.

After everyone sat down, Jody bluntly asked Chen Yansen for the balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, and user and sales data.

Seeing the other side eager to negotiate, Chen Yansen didn't mind—he had Hu Yun distribute the pre-prepared documents to Augusta's staff.

Then Hu Yun connected the projector and opened the data reports.

Next, Hu Yun looked at the translator, signaling him to help explain: the data was presented mainly in Arabic numerals and visual charts, which these foreigners could understand, but the column headers and labels were in Chinese and needed translation.

The translator nodded and assisted Hu Yun in introducing FoxTao's current development status.

3 million daily active users!

30 million yuan in daily sales!

Nearly a million new customers added daily!

The projected annual sales are 10 billion, with a net profit of 600 to 700 million!

To be honest, Fox Tao's development is no worse than Ebates'.

Considering Hua Country's population of 1.4 billion and the enormous e-commerce potential, Jody instantly firmed up his investment intent.

Before coming to Hua Country, Jody's team had already analyzed the shopping-guide market's size, growth rate, share, and competitors — Fox Tao firmly held first place in the industry.

During the conversation, Chen Yansen also floated the idea of a cashback card: in the future, Fox Tao's users, whether shopping at offline supermarkets or on online B2C platforms, would all be able to get rebates.

A credit card combined with a rebate model, extending from online to offline.

Chen Yansen was skilled at painting rosy pictures, and got this bald foreigner so excited his eyes lit up, instantly feeling that Hua Country's shopping-guide e-commerce track had enormous potential.

Just the idea of combining credit cards with supermarket rebates alone, brought back home, would be a market worth tens of billions.

Chen Yansen snickered inwardly — he hadn't expected that an offhand remark would be taken so seriously.

In fact, all these little tricks for expanding the market, someone in the future would try them; they just stayed small-scale and never took off.

For example, buying a certain brand of shampoo at the supermarket, uploading the receipt to get an ad rebate from the brand — it was both troublesome and easy to fake, so it could never really be pushed.

Chen Yansen was just bluffing; these half-baked business plans, he never intended to carry out at all — he just casually painted them while describing Fox Tao's prospects.

Jody's team stayed at the startup park until 6 p. m. before leaving, taking a thick stack of data files with them as they went.

"Sen-ge, when did your English get this good?" Wang Zihao leaned over and asked curiously.

"Picked it up in my spare time." Chen Yansen laughed and brushed it off.

Now it all depends on whether Sequoia and IDG can offer a higher bid.

Zuo Hongyu was helping him find a factory in Shencheng, and Xu Dan had even drawn up the hiring plan — they were all just waiting for the funds to land.

Three days later, after a comprehensive evaluation, Chen Yansen gave up on Sequoia and IDG and chose to cooperate with Augusta.

The other side offered too much!

At a 16 billion valuation, Chen Yansen's 5% stake could fetch 800 million!

If Chen Yansen, as the major shareholder, hadn't withheld authorization from IDG, Penguin, and Siwei Capital to transfer shares, Siwei would probably have been the first to jump out and sell every share in hand to Augusta.

After all, one buy and one sell could net several hundred million.

When the news spread, it stirred up huge waves in the industry — no one had expected that the big-spending tycoon from the Lighthouse Country would be willing to offer such a high price.

With a net worth in the tens of billions, Chen Yansen leapt to the top of the post-90s rich list; some fans believed that those below with net worths of just over a billion weren't even fit to be doormats under Chen Yansen's feet.

Someone simply made a global post-90s rich list, putting Chen Yansen alongside Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg — the list was absurdly wild, yet plenty of people still believed it.

Some even questioned whether Zuckerberg was even a post-90, saying he didn't qualify for the list.

After finding out, Chen Yansen didn't know whether to laugh or cry; but watching his Weibo follower count surge toward ten million, he kept quiet and silently posted handsome photos and brand-group previews.

This completely blocked Chen Ou's "path." He had just secured 10 million USD in funding, but in looks and ability, he couldn't compare to Chen Yansen — if he really went the internet-celebrity-entrepreneur route, he'd most likely be mocked.

In mid-May, driven by Chen Yansen, the Aurora System's R&D progress passed the halfway mark.

At the same time, Xu Dan began recruiting hardware design and industrial design engineers, and gradually transferred the Aurora R&D team's employee contracts to the newly established Sister Chengzi Tech company.

Meanwhile, JingDong secured the largest venture capital funding in its history — Liu Qiangdong's asset-heavy model still won the favor of DST, Tiger Fund, and Sequoia Capital, bringing in 1.5 billion USD.

It let Liu Qiangdong launch his first-ever challenge against Mama Ali's e-commerce dominance.

(End of chapter)