ZILLIZ Speeds up GPU Database Commercialization Layout After Completing $10 Million A1 Round Financing

Angel Round Investor Yunqi Partners Increasing its holdings in the Company

SHANGHAI, June 6, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On May 31, Chinese GPU database company ZILLIZ announced that it had already completed its $10 million A1 round financing in January 2018. The financing was led by Morningside Venture Capital and followed by Green Pine Capital Partners, while the angel round investors Yunqi Partners and Eminence Ventures continued to increase their holdings in the company. The raised funds will help ZILLIZ to accelerate product R&D and further promote the commercialization of GPU databases. When kickstarting the business in 2016, ZILLIZ Founder Charles Xie invested several million RMB of his personal money to set his entrepreneurial adventure in motion. In August 2017, ZILLIZ received an angel round investment of millions of dollars led by Yunqi Partners. Five months later, it obtained the A1 round investment led by Morningside Venture Capital.

GPU databases already enjoy many years of experience in industry applications in the United States. In recent years, there has also been a growing application of GPU databases in China. Compared with its US counterpart, the Chinese market faces an even bigger data volume and a greater demand for efficient and real-time data analysis. Yunqi Partners believes that the GPU database market will embrace a period of high-speed growth in China. The new-generation OLAP database independently developed by ZILLIZ can provide strong support for enterprises to make decisions and operate their businesses.

Mr. Yipin Ng, Founding Partner of Yunqi Partners, said, "When we first met Charles Xie at the end of July 2017, we exchanged in-depth views on the status quo and development opportunities of infrastructure software both at home and abroad. Charles Xie showed remarkable intuition and insight into the evolutions of database technology and computer hardware and software architecture. Compared with CPUs, GPUs are better at processing large-scale parallel computing. This is precisely the core of OLAP. ZILLIZ's GPU-based in-memory database can increase speed by more than two orders of magnitude over CPU databases, while far outperforming MapD and other open source GPU databases in testing performance. Yunqi Partners soon made a decision to lead the angel round of investment in ZILLIZ."

Founded in 2016 with its headquarters in Shanghai, ZILLIZ is focused on developing a new generation of OLAP database systems based on GPU hardware acceleration. Compared with traditional analytical databases, ZILLIZ's core database product MegaWise can improve query performance by more than 100 times, while reducing hardware, operation and maintenance costs by over 10 times. 

Founder Charles Xie once worked at Oracle Headquarters, taking charge of core R&D work on database systems. He was instrumental in the development of the Oracle 12c, an Oracle Multitenant system which adopts the concept of multitenant management and achieves dynamic management of database clusters via a pluggable structure. With its ability to provide database services on public or private clouds, the Oracle 12c has generated an operating revenue of billions of US dollars for Oracle.

Over the 2 years since its founding, ZILLIZ has persistently adhered to a technology-driven development path and successively forged strategic partnerships with a dozen well-known tech companies, including NVIDIA, IBM, Google and Inspur. Currently, ZILLIZ provides three different types of product solutions, namely MegaWise database software, MegaWise database all-in-one machine and MegaWise SaaS.

As a new-generation OLAP database based on GPU hardware acceleration, the MegaWise system tackles heads-on the conflict between the growing data analysis demand in all sectors and an outdated database software and hardware architecture. It has made successful breakthroughs in both computing power and storage bandwidth, which are the two major bottlenecks in data processing. Its actual test performances on the TPC-H database benchmark test set and multiple open data performance tests in the industry have far outstripped those of other similar database products.

ZILLIZ currently focuses itself on multiple fields, including finance, telecommunications, healthcare and retail. The MegaWise database system has been successfully tested and used by several customers. The MegaWise database can boost banks' risk control systems, provide millisecond-level big data processing and make the fundamental change from post-transaction risk control to during-transaction risk control. In the telecommunications sector, the MegaWise database can help operators to substantially increase the speed of analysis report processing and reduce processing time from several hours to only a few minutes. Government agencies can use the MegaWise database to quickly analyze real-time traffic conditions, plan traffic routes, reduce road congestion and improve urban mobility. 

ZILLIZ Founder & CEO Charles Xie remarked, "As a technologically leading GPU database company undertaking its own independent R&D, ZILLIZ will continue to deepen its cultivation of the domestic market, while pushing forward a globalization strategy at the same time. After this round of financing, ZILLIZ will further expand its R&D and business teams, increase its input into product R&D and improve its product layout so as to cover more service scenarios, accelerate its entry into the enterprise market and promote the commercial application of GPU databases."

About YUNQI Partners

Yunqi Partners (Yunqi) was founded in 2014. Yunqi has billions of RMB under management. Yunqi's team comes from diverse backgrounds including IDG Capital, GGV Capital, Google, Baidu, MSRA, and PWC. Yunqi pays close attention to any investment opportunities brought by new technologies, new model-related industrial upgrades, and consumer upgrades. We focus on the investments on Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics, Big Data, Cloud Computing Services, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Fintech. Yunqi is committed to investing in high-quality start-up companies at early and growth stages.

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