Japan’s NEC Corporation invests US$5M into Taiwan’s food review site iPeen

Taiwan’s online food review site iPeen, has just received US$5 million dollars in funding from Japan’s NEC Corporation.

iPeen (愛評網), a Taiwanese startup which aggregates reviews of restaurants, cafes and bars and offers coupons to members, has just received an investment round of US$5 million from Japan’s NEC Corporation. NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational provider of information technology (IT) services and products which provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies.

According to Inside, iPeen currently has more than 200,000 business listings, and enjoys more than 100 million monthly pageviews. iPeen’s mobile app also registers more than 400,000 total downloads.

The funding by NEC into iPeen also marks one of the largest funding amount into a Taiwanese company in the last few years. The funding will see NEC leveraging its expertise, working closely with iPeen to make better use of the big data collected through iPeen to create a true Online to Offline (O2O) business model for both its users as well as business owners.

Read also: 2012 – The year of online to offline?

Prior to this funding, iPeen received two rounds of funding from Japan based CyberAgent Ventures.

Food review portals are recently getting a lot of attention from venture capitalists. Singapore also seen its own food review site HungryGoWhere recently exited to SingTel for S$12 Million. In Thailand, Wongnai is dominating the food review site with an amazing growth of over 400% last year alone. Back in November, Vietnam’s own food review portal Foody.vn was also funded by CyberAgent Ventures.

So, who will be next in the online food or review space?

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