China's PingCap gets $50m Series C
PingCap, a Beijing-based start-up that provides database solutions for enterprise customers, has secured a $50 million Series C round led by Fosun Group and Morningside Venture Capital.
All the company's existing investors, including China Growth Capital, Yunqi Partners, and Matrix Partners China, re-upped.
PingCap was founded in 2015 by a team of engineers who previously worked for the likes of Twitter, JD.com, Baidu, and Sougou. Its flagship product is TiDB, an open-source distributed structured query language (SQL) database management system. It enables users to make interactive information queries from databases and gather related data for reports and analysis.
The new capital will go towards expanding the TiDB ecosystem globally, developing cross-cloud services, and technology upgrades.
"There are more than 300 enterprises, including Tencent and Meituan-Dianping, using our technology in their daily operations. We believe deeply that open-source technology is going to be the future, and the key to success for the entire software industry," Liu Qi, PingCap's CEO and founder, said in a statement.
In addition to Tencent and Meituan-Dianping, TiDB has been adopted by Chinese companies operating in areas such as the internet-enabled services, financial services, online gaming, retail, aviation, and telecommunications. PingCap claims its clients include photo-editing app developer Meitu, news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, and Alibaba-controlled food delivery platform Ele.me.
The company wants to replicate the success enjoyed by foreign open-source software developers. For example, Cloudera, which provides a platform for data engineering and warehousing, went public in the US last year and has a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, while NASDAQ-listed MongoDB, a free and open-source cross-platform database developer, is valued at $4.43 billion.
Matrix and Yunqi participated in PingCap's angel and Series A rounds in 2015 and 2016, respectively. Last year, the company raised $15 million from China Growth Capital, China Renaissance K2 Ventures, and Matrix, according to AVCJ Research.
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