China cloud services player Flywheel raises $45m

Flywheel aims to solve industry pain points data processing leveraging Apache Doris, an open-sourced real-time data analysis tool. It will also develop a cloud-native database called SelectDB based on Doris.

The company was founded in December 2021 by Linjiang Lian, formerly a cloud-focused general manager at Baidu. CTO Guolei Yi previously chaired Baidu’s Doris team and Tencent Holding’s cloud architecture platform Clickhouse. Other team members come from the likes of Alibaba Group, Amazon, ByteDance, Ant Financial, and Kuaishou.

Flywheel’s independence from the major players is an important part of the offering. The idea is that an independent cloud services provider can work with different counterparties and provide customers a unified experience when they use products from different vendors.

The essential play for VC investors in this space is to service the migration of Chinese businesses from traditional IT infrastructure to cloud-based systems.

Although the local internet giants are likely to dominate this process, the outlook for independents is supported by a combination of reliable national internet infrastructure, widespread shortcomings in corporate IT competence, and rising demand for private storage services.

Recent activity includes XSKY receiving a CNY 710m Series E round led by Boyu Capital. XSKY’s focus is on software-defined-infrastructure, which operates independently of any specific hardware, leveraging a decentralized storage structure that reduces costs and facilitates scalability.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Technology
• Early-stage
• China
• data center
• Sequoia Capital
• IDG capital
• enterprise software