Chinese news app raises $1 billion
Toutiao, a Chinese personalized news recommendation app, reportedly raised around $1 billion in Series D funding at an $11 billion valuation from firms like Sequoia Capital China and CCB International.
Why it matters: Because 2017 is quickly becoming the year of Chinese tech unicorns. It's not that they didn't exist previously (and, technically, this particular round appears to have closed at the end of 2016), but it feels like we're witnessing a stampede.
Bottom line: "Besides developing better ways of determining what posts to recommend to users, [Toutiao] has created an artificial reporter, called Xiaoming, that's capable of generating short news reports on European soccer games. It is also working on ways to identify users that might be able to answer specific questions, with a view to offering a service similar to Yahoo Answer or Quora." ― MIT Technology Review