Telstra Ventures has made a strategic investment in Cloopen, a provider of Chinese communications application programming interfaces (APIs).
The investment will increase Telstra’s exposure to the over-the-top (OTT) market in China, and gives Beijing-based Cloopen, which provides APIs enabling developers to integrate messaging functions, video and voice calls in their applications, access to Telstra’s Asia Pacific customer base.
Telstra states that it will also create opportunities for collaboration with the Telstra Software Group.
“With the complex nature of the telecommunications infrastructure in China and different local policies and business practices in each province, Cloopen meets the need among application developers for simplified communications capabilities,” Telstra Ventures managing director Matthew Koertge commented.
“As a platform as a service provider (PaaS), Cloopen can easily integrate a set of communications APIs into applications that provide services such as car-hailing or meal delivery, which are booming in China, to enable functions like application-to-people voice and messaging, two-factor verification and video conferencing.
“It can ease the complexity for application developers to work with multiple telecom operators to equip applications with these communications capabilities.”
Tencent and Alibaba are among more than 150,000 registered developers currently using the platform to build their applications, Koertge stated.
Cloopen CEO Changxun Sun stated that the company “is committed to continuous expansion within China”.
“We are also looking to leverage Telstra’s network to grow our customer base in Australia and across Asia Pacific,” Sun commented. “The cloud communication platform market is estimated to more than triple to US$4.5 billion by 2021, and there are no doubt plenty of opportunities.”
