Telstra makes strategic investment in Chinese PaaS provider

Telstra Ventures has taken a strategic stake in Cloopen, a Beijing-headquartered platform-as-a-service provider.

Cloopen provides a range of APIs that allow developers to integrate communications functions into applications, including messaging, video and voice calls.

According to Telstra there are more than 150,000 developers registered to use the platform. Tencent and Alibaba both use the platform, said Telstra Ventures managing director Matthew Koertge.

“As a platform as a service provider, 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,” Koertge said in a statement.

Telstra said the investment would enable collaboration between Cloopen and its own Software Group.

Since early 2015 Telstra has progressively released APIs that are open to third-party developers.

Currently it offers a Wi-Fi API, that allows the discovery of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots, an SMS API for sending and receiving SMS messages using Telstra's mobile network, and the Connect and Mobile Connect APIs for mobile-based user authentication.

Cloopen CEO Changxun Sun said the investment by Telstra Ventures would also offer new opportunities for his company to boost its customer base in the Asia-Pacific region.

Telstra in May revealed it had taken a strategic stake in vArmour as part of the cloud security company’s US$41 million Series D funding round. vArmour is designed to secure so-called ‘east-west’ traffic within a data centre, delivering security to individual virtualized workloads.

In April the telco’s venture capital arm invested in Nginx, a company best known for its eponymous open source web server software.

In addition to vArmour and Nginx, the company this year has taken stakes in Instart Logic and Chinese cloud storage provider Qiniu.

Telstra Ventures launched in late 2011.

Telstra earlier this week revealed it had boosted its own software development capabilities, acquiring Readify.