Prosperity7 backs China-founded unstructured data specialist Zilliz

Temasek Holdings-owned Pavilion Capital, Hillhouse Capital, 5Y Capital, and Yunqi Capital also contributed to the extension. Each one participated in the USD 43m first tranche of the Series B, which closed in late 2020 and was led by Hillhouse affiliate GL Ventures.

Zilliz has now raised USD 113m to date. This includes a USD 2.5m angel round in 2017 led by Yunqi and a USD 10m Series A led by 5Y the following year. Trustbridge Partners is another of its backers.

The company specialises in unstructured data processing and analysis, developing high-performance vector database management systems for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Modern AI algorithms use feature vectors to represent the deep semantics of unstructured data, necessitating purpose-built data infrastructure to manage and process them at scale.

Founded in 2017, Zilliz established Milvus, which is now the world's most popular cloud-native open-source vector database and capable of processing billion-scale vector data in milliseconds. In the past 12 months, Milvus downloads have passed 1m, up from 300,000, while production users grew 300%. Users include eBay, Shopee, Ikea, Walmart, Xiaomi, SmartNews, Dailyhunt, and Nvidia.

The company – which relocated its headquarters to Silicon Valley and is looking to build out engineering and commercialisation teams – is now working on next-generation database technologies to help customers rapidly create AI and machine learning applications and unlock the potential of unstructured data.

Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed vector database service available on public cloud systems is currently at the private preview and feedback stage. It represents one more step towards the company’s goal of becoming a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for vector data processing, unstructured data analytics, and enterprise AI application development.

"We believe that the company is in a strong position to build a cloud platform around Milvus that will unleash new and powerful business insights and outcomes for its customers, just as data analytics platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have done with structured data,” said Aysar Tayeb, an executive managing director at Prosperity7, in a statement.

“There is already over 4x more unstructured data than structured data, a gap that will continue to grow as AI, robotics, IoT [internet-of-things], and other technologies meld the digital and physical realms."

Prosperity7 has become increasingly active in China over the past year. It has participated in funding rounds for several robotics start-ups and recently led the second tranche of a Series D for AI-driven drug discovery company Insilico Medicine.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• North America
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• USA
• Prosperity7 Ventures
• Temasek Holdings
• Hillhouse Capital Management
• 5Y capital
• Yunqi Partners
• artificial intelligence