(Yicai Global) May 18 -- Stepone, a Chinese smart marketing services provider, has secured tens of millions of US dollars from one investor, Lightspeed China Partners, in its Series A round of funding to expand its commercial reach.

Stepone will use the proceeds of the latest fundraising to enlarge its data analytics and sales teams to scale up, the Beijing-based company said in a statement today.

In August 2020, the software-as-a-service platform developer bagged tens of millions of Chinese yuan from Xinyi Capital in its pre-Series A round of financing. Before that, former Baidu Senior Vice President Xiang Hailong personally invested millions of yuan in the firm.

"Marketing SaaS can directly help enterprises solve the problem of low operational efficiency and thus increase their revenue scale," said Executive Director Zhang Wenzhan. And the success of the platform depends on whether it can solve its users' problems, he added.

Stepone made several millions of renminbi in core revenue in a single month, jumping by four times, said the firm. It had been operating fully for just over a year at that time. The company offers its website domain and user traffic monitoring services to clients in many fields, including finance, taxation, automotive, and education.

The biggest difference between Stepone and its rivals lies in the former's profound understanding of the industry, according to Zhang. With its deep-learning algorithm, Stepone can recommend business opportunities to enterprise users and tell them insights about their clients, he added.

Editor: Emmi Laine, Xiao Yi