Open source has become the cornerstone of technology application and industry digital development, and the commercialization of open source has made a great breakthrough, which is favored by many VC.
At present, more and more basic open source software enterprises are getting financing:
Domestic networking operating system RT-Thread and Riseside Technology completed a round B financing of nearly 100 million yuan;
SylixOS team, Yihui Information, completed the ROUND A financing of 120 million yuan;
Taos Data, the company behind TDengine, secured $20 million in funding during the pandemic…
AI unstructured data processing and analytics software company Zilliz announced the completion of a $43 million Series B funding round;
According to official sources, this is the largest single series B financing in the global open source infrastructure software field to date.
This round of financing was led by Hillhouse Ventures, followed by Principal Capital and Pavilion Capital. Series A lead investor Wuyuan Capital (formerly Morningside Capital) and Angel lead investor Yunqi Capital continued to raise their bets, with Yibai Capital acting as the exclusive financial advisor.
What are Zilliz’s unique technical strengths?
80% of data in human society exists in the form of unstructured data, which has not been effectively utilized.
Zilliz’s unique technical advantages:
As a pioneer of AI unstructured data processing and analysis technology, Zilliz focuses on AI unstructured data processing and analysis technology. With the help of strong computing power and efficient AI algorithms provided by heterogeneous computing, High dimensional data and models (feature vector and Embedding) are used to analyze, understand, index and search widely existing unstructured data such as pictures, videos, behavior portraits, compound 3D structures and gene sequences.
Zilliz’s vector similarity search engine, Milvus, is open on GitHub. Milvus is currently deployed in machine vision, natural language processing, audio search, chemical formula analysis, and more. It is widely used in many fields such as image processing, computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, recommendation system, search engine, drug discovery and gene analysis.
Milvus was accepted as an incubator project by the LF AI & Data Foundation in April 2020, and currently ranks first in contributions to the LF AI & Data Foundation.
From an open source business perspective: Zilliz is still unprofitable.
Recently, Zilliz founder and CEO Star Jue was elected chairman of the board of DIRECTORS of LF AI. This is the first time that a Chinese representative has held a top leadership position in the international top open source AI community.
Zilliz was founded to provide tens of millions of programmers around the world with data management tools that enable faster indexing, low-cost storage and flexible scheduling of data. He said the funds raised in this round will mainly be used to:
- Global talent recruitment,
- Build an open source software ecosystem
- Developing cloud products and services
- Popularize and apply AI unstructured data processing and analysis techniques
Starlord Kaiyuan has something to say! Note to open source developers:
First, domestic open source projects should choose the theme and direction of open source, and never repeat the wheel.
Second, developers need to define the boundaries of open source projects.
Third, open source projects as a weapon to understand user needs, close to user needs
How does Zilliz monetize the project once it’s open source?
In the future, open source projects may help developers greatly reduce the software cost of AI unstructured data processing and analysis applications; Provide relevant cloud services to help further reduce overall costs.