What does Chinafy do?
Chinafy is a powerful technology that makes foreign websites super fast in China, without the need for licenses or programmers.
How did you/the founders come up with the idea?
Based in Hong Kong, the team has experience working with brands that struggle regularly with crossborder business. It’s through these discussions with a number of global hotel chains, and luxury brands, we found that this was a recurring theme – Be the exclusive technology provider for Global China business? How could we not jump at this opportunity?
Could you tell us a bit about you and your team?
My co-founder, Catherine Tan, and I, Kevin Lepsoe, come from investment banking where I previously ran financial engineering at Morgan Stanley, and she did derivatives sales. My CTO, Rosanna, is one of Hong Kong’s top engineers where she previously worked with Adobe, Lockheed Martin, and Yahoo. Rosanna has an MSc Com Sci from Stanford and MBA from Carnegie Mellon.
What are the other alternatives to Chinafy?
The only alternative to Chinafy is to build an entirely different site for China, and to manage these two sites separately. This process is expensive to do, difficult to maintain and it creates inconsistencies between the two sites. This takes large companies, and global hotel chains 2-3 years to implement, whereas Chinafy only takes a couple days.
Who is your target customer?
Most of our customers come from travel (hotels, tourist attractions, local governments), real estate (property developers, real estate agents), and education (universities, boarding schools), although we have law firms, banks, agencies and recently, professional sports teams.
How does your product make a difference to the industry?
We can make potentially the entire western internet accessible in China. This is incredibly important not just for information sharing, but also for commerce.
What are the milestones for Chinafy?
We were featured on CNBC a while back, and on BBC alongside TikTok and VMware just a month ago!
Why did you start targeting Japan?
About 20% of Japan’s entire exports are to China with it being also the largest source of tourist inflows. With such a huge reliance on Chinese demand, and limited technological connectivity, Chinafy performs an essential role in connecting the economies closer together.
