# Tao Zhang

> Tao Zhang is a Series A investor in Shanghai backing Consumer, Internet and Payments. See 12 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Location: Shanghai, China
- Total investments: 12
- Last investment: Jul 2021
- Lead investor: 42%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tzhang1203

Tao Zhang is a Series A investor in Shanghai focused on Consumer and Internet. Tao Zhang (张滔) is the Founder and CEO of Dianping.com, MBA from the Wharton School. Tao was consultant in an American IT company. After coming back to China in 2003, he founded Dianping.com, the world’s pioneer in offering consumer reviews for restaurant. After 5 years of development, dianping has over 460,000 registered companies in over 340cities across China. More than 10 million regular visitors and 160 million page views per month make it the most popular city life website in China. Dianping has established branches in 5 cities including Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Hangzhou and is still expanding. Currently its service involves various consumption areas in city life, such as restaurant, shopping, reaction and living service, etc. With a favorable business model, Dianping has more than once been considered one of the companies with the most investment value in China by Zero2IPO and China Venture. It also raised funding from global leading venture capital firms, for example, Sequoia Capital. Dianping recorded profit in November 2008 and become the first profitable Web 2.0 Company and a search website centered on city life.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Series A | $1.4M–$145M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Consumer | 2 | 17% |
| Internet | 2 | 17% |
| Payments | 2 | 17% |
| Education | 2 | 17% |
| ISP | 1 | 8% |

34 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series A | 4 | 33% |
| Seed | 2 | 17% |
| Funding Round | 2 | 17% |
| Grant | 1 | 8% |
| Series B | 1 | 8% |

6 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| China | 6 | 50% |
| United States | 3 | 25% |
| India | 1 | 8% |
| Singapore | 1 | 8% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Z-Trip | Z-Trip is a company that provides travel management services for large and medium-sized enterprises. On the basis of integration of upstream supply chain resources, Z-Trip provides a one-stop SaaS service platform covering scenarios such as travel reservations, conference organization, fee settlement, payment and reimbursement to enterprises,including front-end PC terminals, mobile terminals and back-end service systems. |  | Series A | Jul 19, 2021 |  |
| Lumous Intelligence | Lumous is a leading brand of smart hotel solutions, providing integrated solutions to help hotels streamline the operational processes, optimize service quality and curate personalized guest experiences. Lumous Intelligence was founded in 2018 and was headquartered in Shanghai, China. |  | Series A | Dec 24, 2020 |  |
| PalFish | PalFish provides an education platform for teachers to teach English in an open market. You can simply imagine PalFish as eBay, but the merchandise being sold are English Classes. They provide people who are fluent in English the opportunity to teach people who want to learn English in their free time, and thus, create a virtuous Englisheducation cycle. | $120M | Series C | Aug 17, 2020 |  |
| Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania | Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation across every major discipline of business education. With a broad global community and one of the most published business school faculties, Wharton creates economicand social value around the world. The School has 5,000 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral students; more than 9,000 participants in executive education programs annually and a powerful alumni network of 93,000 graduates. | $5M | Grant | May 18, 2020 |  |
| SHIELD | SHIELD helps world-leading enterprises build trust and safety by stopping fraud and abuse. Our products span fraud prevention, network security, credit intelligence, and identity verification. Trusted across all continents by enterprises such as Razer, Alibaba, and BEAT, we protect over seven billion devices and 500 million user accounts everyyear. | $20M | Series B | Jun 26, 2018 |  |
| CarBlock | CarBlock is the world's first intelligent transportation solution based on blockchain technology and combined with intelligent hardware data collection. It solves the biggest pain points in the development of the car networking industry by chaining car data blocks. |  |  | May 30, 2018 |  |
| Black Fish | Black Fish develops and operates an Internet finance platform. It provides consumer finance services such as, credit, money management, loans, and installment payment plans. Black Fish also offers financial services like consumer loans, installment, and wealth management facilities. It began operation in 2017, with its headquarters in Nanjing inChina. | $145M | Series A | Jan 10, 2018 |  |
| Cadence | Cadence Translate ("Cadence"​) is a leading provider of language services to the global business and investment community.Through clever deployment of humans and technology, we empower our clients to conduct better meetings, easily engage new markets, and glean greater insight from research and due diligence interactions.We offer:-a talented community of 2,500+ linguists, each with unique industry knowledge; - bespoke, personalized matchmaking for every project; - the latest tools in translation tech for faster turnaround time.Cadence is a venture-backed company whose investors include 500 Startups, the founder of Dianping (大众点评), and several luminaries from the interpretation industry.We have offices in New York and Beijing. | $650K | Seed | Jul 20, 2017 |  |
| Wifi Dabba | We're a new kind of network. The high speed kind of network. We're going to provide insanely cheap wifi across Bangalore city. The government's not gonna do it, the big companies shouldn't be allowed to do it. It's up to you and we to just do it. |  | Seed | Mar 20, 2017 |  |
| Xingbianli | Xingbianli is a checkout-free convenience store operator engaged on placing snack bars in offices. The company focuses in developing checkout-free convenience stores and snack bars. Its snack bars provide drinks, biscuits, and instant noodle to office workers, and allows customers to pay via mobile payment options like WeChat Pay and Alipay. | $14.2M |  |  |  |

10 of 12 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Luminous Ventures (former Lightspeed China Partners)](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lightspeed-china-partners) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [CPE](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/citic-pe) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Consensus Lab](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/consensus-lab) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [DHVC](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/danhua-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Fenbushi Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/fenbushi-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [FutureX Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/futurex-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together

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## FAQ

### What does Tao Zhang invest in?

Tao Zhang invests primarily in Consumer, Internet and Payments startups, most often at Series A and Seed stage. Most of the 12 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in China. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Tao Zhang's check size?

Tao Zhang typically joins rounds of $1.4M–$145M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Tao Zhang participates in.

### When did Tao Zhang last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Tao Zhang closed in Jul 2021. Shizune tracks 12 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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