Xunlei – One Of The Top Internet Companies In China.

Xunlei is a publicly-traded Chinese multinational technology company that was founded in 2003. Based in the technology sector, the company is mainly a provider of online services. It is one of the most widely used internet brands in the country but it is primarily famous for computing and blockchain technology. The headquarters of Xunlei is based in Shenzhen, China. It also has a subsidiary called Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technologies Co Ltd. Xunlei offers products and services to both individual and enterprise users and the solutions include cloud computing, download acceleration, blockchain, etc. It has also received several awards and accolades for its digital technology, and innovative products, and for consistently being one of the top internet companies in China. 

Story of Xunlei

Although Xunlei was officially founded in 2003, the company’s first prototype emerged in Silicon Valley, the USA in 2002. After one year, when Xunlei was established, Thunder 2 was released for the first time. Within the next year, the company witnessed an increase in the number of users and eventually released Xunlei 3 and Xunlei 4. In 2005, the company hosted a funding round in which it successfully raised $10 million approximately. In the same year, it also released Mini Thunder and Thunder 5. 2006 was a benchmark year for the company as it crossed 100 million users. Moreover, the company’s download-acceleration software became a software with the largest user scale. In 2007, Xunlei signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with Google in Beijing. The company also incorporated many implementations in the cross-protocol download section. 

Expansion

In 2008, the company released a chain of new products together including Thunder Software Assistant, Thunder Game, Thunder Security Assistant, and many more. Later that year, the company held a press conference regarding China’s internet content distribution. Again in 2009, a lot of new products and upgraded versions of some products were released. For example, Xunlei released its Home Digital Entertainment products and along with that launched Thunderbolt Heroes Web Game. In 2010, the number of Xunlei users exceeded the 300 million mark, and paid users reached 1 million. The company also released Thunder 7 that year, thus opening a new era for internet downloads. 

In 2011, it finally released its products for iPad, and the Mac version for Thunder was also released. The company’s online video site, Xunlei Kankan became the first online video site in China to achieve high definition on the whole network. In 2013, the total Xunlei users reached 460 million and the paid users reached 5.2 million. Earlier in 2014, the company received a huge amount of funding of $200 million from Xiaomi followed by which it went public and got listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. After the investment, Xioami also partnered with Xunlei to jointly release Star CDN. In 2017, it occupied 42nd place in the list of China’s top 100 internet companies. Recently, the company has released its BaaS platform such that users can deploy their chain with a click, thus making the process much more convenient. 

Jinbo Li – CEO of Xunlei

In April 2020, Jinbo Li became the Chairman and CEO of Xunlei. Li comes with industrial expertise of more than 20 years exclusively in China’s internet and technology sector. He is associated with the company from the very beginning as he helped in establishing and running the core R&D team of the company from 2004 to 2009. In 2010, Li left the company and worked for two other internet ventures for the next four years followed by which he founded Itui International Inc, a mobile application development company. Jinbo Li went to Shandong University followed by Peking University.