SphereEx, a data frontier technology startup, received a multi-million dollar angel round of funding from Sequoia China seed fund and Beginner Capital on May 14.
SphereEx is a company dedicated to building new distributed data infrastructures that are open source, shared, ecological, and platform-driven. ShardingSphere, the distributed middleware developed by ShardingSphere, has the core technology characteristics of “platform, pluggable, cloud native”, and is an ideal solution for large-scale data applications and data value-added applications.
The core founding team of SphereEx came from Apache’s top project ShardingSphere, head Internet companies, and well-known infrastructure software providers. Zhang Liang, CEO & Founder of The company, said, “This round of financing will be used to build a team, software productization and brand operation, in order to build an open source, open and innovative technology company. To build the company into the cornerstone of the information innovation industry and the target of the open source community.”
As an open source project, ShardingSphere has been developing for more than 5 years, gaining attention of over 13K+ stars, with nearly 200 contributors, and has become one of the most popular projects in the field.
ShardingSphere is in a leading position in terms of technical completeness, stability and community activity. It is used in the production environment of more than 160 enterprises, covering Internet, finance, O2O, logistics, cloud computing and other fields, and has been recognized by many enterprise-level open source users.
SphereEx will continue to adhere to the open source philosophy and build a distributed middleware ecosystem based on ShardingSphere’s accumulated technology ecosystem. Sphere+Ex in the name of the company means ecology + expansion. The idea of Database Plus, first proposed by The company, aims to create a new concept of data use, improve the level of enterprise data application, easily cope with complex data application scenarios, and eventually form a distributed middleware PaaS platform.
Why ShardingSphere?
With the deepening of enterprise digital transformation, more data are mined and used by enterprises, so the derived data usage scenarios are also more diversified. From the perspective of the breadth, depth and way of data use, the way of data consumption is undergoing tremendous changes and presents some distinct characteristics:
- The data scale is huge, from GB, TB to PB level. Traditional monomer database is difficult to bear, so distributed products are popular.
- Multiple data scenarios make it difficult to carry all data needs through one or two platforms; However, when enterprises choose more platforms, it will not only bring more cost input, but also bring great challenges and inconvenience to data governance, data management, data development, data security and many other aspects.
- The architecture layer is mixed, which has gone through the road from monomer to cluster, from centralized to distributed, and from local deployment to cloud deployment. However, the evolution of architecture is not a substitution relationship, and the new architecture cannot completely replace the original architecture. Therefore, products of various architectures exist simultaneously in the enterprise, which brings great trouble to the use and management of the enterprise. A unified architecture is an inevitable choice, but it is far from easy to say.
- Technology is evolving rapidly. Infrastructure upgrading is accelerating in terms of development, cost, security and autonomy, but it also faces the classic problem of “changing tires for sports cars”.
Faced with the above problems, how to decouple the underlying data base platform from the upper data application has become the core pain point in the digital transformation of enterprises. SphereEx’s Database Plus (Database capability Enhancement) and Database Mesh (Database service grid) concepts are designed to provide a new approach to this problem. ShardingSphere project, which follows this concept, can attract a large number of developers in a short period of time and be used in many enterprises, which is the initial practice of this idea. In the future, this will lead to a revolution in the use of data.
What can we do?
As the commercial company behind the ShardingSphere open Source project, SphereEx will promote the stable, rapid and dynamic development of the Apache ShardingSphere open Source community by adhering to the philosophy of openness, diversity, collaboration and connecting developers and users around the world. On the other hand, it will provide business service support and enterprise solutions that better match the requirements of the scenario. Continue to build distributed database middleware ecosystem as the core, provide capabilities including but not limited to database and table, read and write separation, desensitization encryption, data gateway, distributed transaction, distributed governance, heterogeneous data platform and other capabilities, and export the above capabilities in database native + cloud native mode; We hope that ShardingSphere will eventually develop into a world-class star open source project and a new standard for data use.
Core strengths
Since ShardingSphere started operation in 2016, it has attracted a large number of developers and accumulated rich scene practices in the use of many enterprises. Its original open source model, has a strong network effect, the first mover advantage is very obvious.
From the perspective of technology itself, ShardingSphere has passed large-scale online environmental verification. Whether it was derived from dangdang infrastructure platform in its early stage, or jingdong was defined as the core component of financial distributed database, it has experienced the complex environment of large e-commerce platform. With over 160 external corporate clients, Many users, including CCB, MINsheng Bank, China Telecom Yipay (Sweet Orange Finance), JINGdong, Dangdang, Baidu, iQiyi, Tencent Music, Zto Express, Yunda Express, Flash Delivery, Ctrip, 58, Good future, IFLYTEK, Hikvision, OPPO, VIVO, Ideal Car, Keep and so on, are used in the production environment. In the expert interview, experts also expressed their recognition of ShardingSphere’s products and team’s ability.
- Zheng Hao, senior director of JD Technology, said: “ShardingSphere has always been adhering to the concept of independent and open source in the data open source ecosystem, and has become the preferred data technology product of many enterprises. It also has rich application scenarios in JD ShardingSphere. Based on the understanding of requirements, Zhang Liang and his team promote the development of data ecology in the industry. “We expect ShardingSphere to be deployed in more production scenarios and help enterprises control their own data and services in the process of digital transformation.”
- “Our company has been paying attention to this team and its product line for a long time. Our own business development cannot be separated from the support of such an excellent team, especially in solving key problems in the industry, the processing ideas and solutions of this team and their products are more in line with our impression of the expectation and direction of the future development of industry technology. So in the future, I hope to work more closely with them, especially on products.”
- Xu Ying, Senior technical Director of Dangdang, said, “The e-commerce technology platform system is complex and highly coupled. In order to solve the massive user access and high concurrency of Dangdang, ShardingSphere emerged as The Times required. It is still one of the most important components of the unified application framework of Dangdang. And ShardingSphere, once open source, is hot, becoming the most popular Apache top-level project. Since Zhang Liang typed the first line of code in 2015, ShardingSphere has been evolving. With the concept of open source, platform-based and pluggable, ShardingSphere has played an important role in many industries. ShardingSphere itself has zero intrusion on business. We really expect Zhang Liang and his team to shine the design and concept of Database Mesh in the cloud native field, and effectively solve the Database application governance under the cloud native architecture.”
Team situation
SphereEx Company, co-founded by ShardingSphere PMC Chair Zhang Liang and PMC core member Pan Juan. The founding team came from core members of Apache’s top projects, well-known Internet companies and well-known infrastructure software providers. The team has rich experience in basic software architecture, r&d, implementation, delivery and marketing.
- Zhang Liang, Apache Member, Apache ShardingSphere and ElasticJob founder & PMC Chair, former JINGdong Technology architecture expert, Dangdang Architecture Department Director. He specializes in distributed architecture, espouses elegant code, and loves open source and technology sharing. He has acted as producer and sharing guest in large technology summit for many times. Published the book “Future Architecture — from Servitization to Cloud Native”.
- Pan Juan, Apache Member and Apache ShardingSphere PMC, former senior DBA of JINGdong Technology, used to be responsible for the design and development of intelligent database platform of Jingdong Data Department, now focuses on distributed database & middleware ecology and open source field. He was named “2020 Chinese Open Source Pioneer” and was invited to participate in related conferences in the field of database and architecture for many times.
ShardingSphere core team said that ShardingSphere open source ecosystem will continue to advance at a high speed in the future, and will continue to build in harmony with developers and users from all over the world. Because it came from open source and will come to open source.
Financing situation
SphereEx’s angel round is a multi-million dollar joint investment from Sequoia China Seed Fund and Beginner Capital.
- Zheng Qingsheng, partner of Sequoia Capital China Fund, said, “Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud are the evolution form of enterprise IT architecture in the future. The management of heterogeneous database will be one of the challenges. ShardingSphere cleverly builds a component service ecosystem and heterogeneous database management platform between database and application layer, which occupies a unique position in the database ecosystem. At the same time, ShardingSphere, as a 13K Stars Apache top project, is an internationally competitive open source project with a robust community. Zhang Liang, the founder, is an excellent architect with a global vision and deep thinking. The core team is complementary and cohesive. I hope to promote the Chinese infrastructure team to go global together with Zhang Liang’s team.”
- Yu Zhenzhen, executive director of Chu Xin Capital, said, “The frontier technology of database has been the focus of Chu Xin Capital for a long time. With the growth of enterprise data volume and data applications, diversified data types and application requirements force enterprises to constantly upgrade their big data infrastructure capabilities, and the database types they use become increasingly fragmented, which will cause great operational burden for infrastructure management in the future. For large enterprises, the biggest challenge in the application of new technology has never been the introduction of new products, but the replacement and compatibility of the old and new. This need is often overwhelming and not met by database product companies, often seen as’ dirty work ‘by other service providers, but the middleware layer where SphereEx is located addresses this problem with a PaAS-based pattern. In addition, the SphereEx team is very optimistic about the SphereEx founding team. The founder, Liang Zhang, has a long-term vision and deep thinking about the evolution of future computer architecture. The Database Mesh and Database Plus concepts proposed by the SphereEx team are not trivial and showy concepts. It’s a key platform that can really solve real problems for enterprise customers. At the same time, after five years of operation and product iteration, ShardingSphere has become a leader in open source distributed middleware in China and is widely recognized in the community and among enterprise users. We look forward to the next chapter in SphereEx.”
