It has been rumored for quite a long time, Tudou, the largest video sharing website in China, finally officially announced its $57 million series D financing at a $150 million valuation, which is the largest round of funding ever for a Chinese Internet company, and make Tudou’s total fund raising to $85 million over the past 3 years. Previously, Tudou raised $500k, $8.5 million and $19 million respectively.

Tudou said in its press release:

We were very happy that our existing investors decided to double-down on us by re-investing in this round(note by CWR: Tudou’s existing investors include IDGVC, GGV, Capital Today, General Catalyst Partners, KTB and JAFCO Asia, most of the news mentioned IDGVC, GGV and General Catalyst in this round), and we were also very happy to welcome a couple of new investors, family and venture funds from Singapore and the US who prefer to remain unnamed for now.

In last December, we suggested that Tudou would need a new round of financing, considering high burnrate of video business and fierce competition in the market. Now, it is great that Tudou can successfully close this round when facing uncertainty in regulation environment. Now Tudou is ahead of competitors again, and it “actually turned down offers of even higher funding”, because “because this industry is not about raising more money”.

Tudou also disclosed its stats in press release, “over 100 million clip views & page views to over 10 million unique users every day, and over 60 million unique users every month“. But recently Youku and Tudou seemed to fight with each other on traffic, because iResearch rank Youku as the largest video sharing website in China.(tip by Bill Bishop on Twitter) That’s a big problem of China’s web industry, we don’t have a reliable third-party data on web traffic.