Chinese social shopping search engine B5M announced a USD7.1 million Series A investment round led by Oak Investment Partners and Giosis Holdings.

B5M will use the funds for website development, marketing and ongoing innovation. Allan Kwan and Youngbae Ku will join B5M's board of directors representing Oak Investment Partners and Giosis Holdings, respectively.

B5M, which means "help me buy" in Chinese, is designed to help Chinese consumers make informed purchasing decisions. It combines product and shopping data with community features to promote social shopping decisions with comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased search results.

Over the past four years the company says it assembled a local team in China and launched a beta site that has indexed over 30 million business-to-consumer products, product reviews, and shopping-related web articles. The company was founded by Yeogirl Yun.