Feishu, ByteDance’s workplace collaboration app, surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue last year, Feishu chief executive Xie Xin told staff on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.
In late 2021, Workplace Tools will become one of the company’s six separate business groups. That means it was given the same strategic importance as his other BGs on ByteDance, including TikTok, Douyin, Dali (education BG), and BytePlus (B2B AI and data). infrastructure) and Nuverse (video games).
The milestone was first reported by Chinese tech news site 36kr. This comes just days after another Chinese news outlet, her Leiphone, questioned Feishu’s cash burning in a controversial article. ARR typically measures a software company’s subscription-based revenue.
Feishu, which has an international version called Lark, is a comprehensive work communication messenger with useful features, from video calls and automatic note-taking on shared calendars to collaborative documents. Feishu put a lot of resources into building these features themselves. This is in contrast to Slack’s open platform, which integrates with a myriad of third-party applications.
Doing everything in-house helps provide a frictionless user experience, but comes at a huge cost. According to Leiphone’s article, at its peak in 2022, Feishu’s headcount was 10,000 (including outsourced workers). The Wall Street Journal reported that Feish now has 7,000 people.
For comparison, Slack reported annual revenue of $902.6 million with 2,545 full-time employees in January 2021.
ByteDance’s hefty investment in Feishu speaks volumes for the state of enterprise software in China. At a time when Silicon Valley investors herald product-led growth (services that convert users through products, as exemplified by Calendly), Chinese software is still selling, marketing to acquire users. , and heavily dependent on services.
As a handful of founders have lamented to me over the years, many of them are now stepping up their overseas expansion because the culture of paying for SaaS has not really arrived in China yet. increase. On the supply side, competition is fierce. Generative AI founder shared the dilemma of running an enterprise tech startup in China.
“In the US, you can do pretty well by building product-driven software that doesn’t rely on human services to acquire and retain users. But in China, even if you have a great product, Your rival can steal your source code overnight and hire dozens of customer support staff that don’t cost much to outrun you.”
