5Y News | Portfolio Company DataBlackhole Closes Nearly RMB 100 Million Series C2 Round

StartDT Group announced today that it completed a nearly RMB 100 million Series C2 financing round at the end of 2022, led by Yuhang State Investment with follow-on investment from Bank of China Bohai Fund. To date, StartDT has raised nearly RMB 300 million in total Series C funding. The Series C was led by Taikang Life (executed by its asset management arm Taikang Asset) and Yuhang State Investment, with follow-on investors including ByteDance, DT Capital, Xiyun Capital, and Bank of China Bohai Fund.

The proceeds will be used for independent and controllable data technology R&D, continuous product and service upgrades, and accelerated "enterprise-grade" capability building — all aimed at steadily optimizing revenue structure and achieving high-quality development.

5Y Capital invested in StartDT's Pre-A, Series A, and Series B rounds. Yuan Ye, a partner at 5Y Capital, said: "Since we first connected in 2018, we've witnessed StartDT repeatedly surpass its own benchmarks — in products, technology, industry understanding, and customer service. What's remarkable is that they've always respected business fundamentals, firmly believing in the closed loop of 'customer needs → customer value → strong reputation.'"

StartDT (StartDT) is an independent third-party data technology group founded in 2016, with two flagship brands: "StartDT" and "GrowingIO." It focuses on building unified, open, neutral, and secure data clouds and comprehensive, full-scenario, intelligent, and user-friendly analytics clouds for clients. Its core products include the DataSimba data cloud platform, data storage and compute engines, data security engines, growth analytics, and customer data platforms. To date, StartDT Group has served over 1,500 clients across retail, manufacturing, finance, and government sectors, helping them build proprietary data capabilities and empowering business decisions across all scenarios to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Exactly one year ago today, StartDT announced its acquisition of GrowingIO, a domestic leader in analytics cloud — the company's biggest move of the past year. Described by industry observers as "the only major merger in the data industry in 2022," the deal underscored StartDT's determination to deepen its "platform + applications" strategy and build a closed-loop data value chain.

"The next 20 years of big data will be about data applications," said Zhang Jinyin (also known by his alias "Xingzai"), founder and CEO of StartDT. In his vision of the future enterprise data landscape, the data cloud serves as the foundational platform, capable of hosting diverse and user-friendly data applications developed by StartDT, its partners, or the enterprise itself — meeting ever-expanding data needs.

GrowingIO's analytics cloud, born with "growth" in its DNA, represents the archetype of data applications: the most effective at converting data into business value and practicing data-driven growth.

Following the official merger announcement, StartDT Group formally launched its "Data Cloud + Analytics Cloud" product matrix. Within six months, it completed the integration of products and teams from both companies, emerging from the post-merger "growing pains" to serve clients under a unified StartDT identity.

Xingzai noted that the two product teams each have their own specializations, further improving R&D efficiency and quality: Data Cloud goes deep on technology, with core products including the DataSimba platform, DataBlack security engine, and DataKun storage engine; Analytics Cloud opens up scenarios, with standout products including User Behavior Analytics (UBA) and Customer Data Platform (CDP). Analytics Cloud is personally led by GrowingIO founder Simon Zhang, once named one of the "world's top ten frontier data scientists."

"Data Cloud + Analytics Cloud" Product Matrix

In this "Data Cloud + Analytics Cloud" system, Analytics Cloud connects data to business for clients, adding "imagination" for data value to Data Cloud; Data Cloud's contribution to Analytics Cloud operates below the surface — building "productive capacity" to handle broader, more scalable, and more complex data demands. For example:

Not only integrating online and offline user data, but also correlating "people, goods, and channels" data to guide other business domains; stably handling daily workloads while effortlessly absorbing peaks like Double 11, with extreme resource allocation to eliminate unnecessary waste; managing data assets across different clouds, sub-brands, subsidiaries, and business formats in a way that is "both independent and unified" — preserving local permissions and uniqueness while establishing a group-level perspective and consolidating group data assets.

Simon Zhang observed that as digitalization deepens, "point solutions driving point growth" is no longer sufficient for enterprises. How to reduce redundant wheel-reinvention and build robust, reliable data capabilities for cost reduction and efficiency improvement amid complex scenarios spanning multiple brands, business formats, systems, clouds, and endpoints — this is the challenge facing many enterprises entering a new phase of digitalization.

To address these needs, StartDT Group architecturally integrated Analytics Cloud and Data Cloud at the product level, enabling enterprise data to flow seamlessly between platform (Data Cloud) and applications (Analytics Cloud) without secondary development. This helps enterprises resolve data source management, data quality governance, data development and operations, and data security control in one place — ensuring safer, smoother data storage and usage pipelines. Meanwhile, certain Data Cloud capabilities are reused in Analytics Cloud (StartDT calls this "Simba Inside," after DataSimba, the core Data Cloud product), ensuring Analytics Cloud delivers excellent performance even when serving clients independently, and boosting efficiency for massive-scale data processing and analytics.

"One-ID" is a telling example. One-ID refers to the integration and unification of multi-source business data, using ID-Mapping and other technologies to correlate data across systems, generating unique user identifiers within security and compliance boundaries, continuously enriching tags and expanding data to build comprehensive, multi-dimensional user profiles for use in scenarios like unified operations.

Given the reality of multi-touchpoint marketing and multi-channel sales, One-ID has become an essential step in enterprise digital transformation. Yet this seemingly fundamental concept presents major enterprises with multiple practical challenges: demanding computational performance requirements, complex computing scenarios, and validation of result accuracy.

To this end, StartDT built an industry-unique "streaming-batch-graph unified" technical architecture within its DataSimba platform to support One-ID needs: supporting full-channel, massive-scale user data computation with dramatically improved processing efficiency and high result accuracy, while reducing storage and compute costs. This solution and technical capability are then embedded into Analytics Cloud products in "Simba Inside" form — meaning Analytics Cloud clients can directly enjoy superior One-ID performance without needing to grapple with complex multi-engine computing logic.

"We connected over 100 endpoints and implemented One-ID, reducing computation time by at least 50% compared to traditional approaches," reported a financial services group with over 200 central branch companies and nearly 5,000 marketing service outlets, after working with StartDT. "Currently, test case pass rates have reached 100%. Overall, we've met requirements for computational performance, query and analytics performance, timeliness, interpretability, and even computational cost — which is no small feat."

Consistent with the trajectory envisioned at the time of the merger, the strategy of "dual-cloud data integration and bilateral capability reuse" has expanded the original capability boundaries of both StartDT and GrowingIO, driving both toward broader data product markets.

Since StartDT Group launched its dual-cloud product matrix, over a hundred new and existing clients have implemented the solutions, including cases of repeat and expanded purchases combining "DataSimba + CDP" and "UBA + DataSimba."

The "1+1 > 2" synergy effect is manifesting in practice. IT Juzi, a venture capital database service, wrote in its year-end 2022 review: "Post-merger StartDT may be entering the unicorn club."

Three years of pandemic forced domestic enterprises onto the fast track of digital transformation.

VUCA environments demand enterprise rationality — extracting business growth from data, decision support from data, scientific management from data, even direct action through data and AI. Use cases like ChatGPT have infinitely expanded human imagination of current AI capabilities. Across industries, cloud computing-based big data and AI are no longer experimental "buzzwords" but genuine competitive advantages.

Meanwhile, enterprises' recent "online-ization" has accumulated massive data volumes. How to monetize this data as quickly as possible, ensuring its value exceeds storage costs, and how to pay down the "technical debt" of outdated data architectures — these are propositions enterprises can no longer avoid.

Real demand is accelerating sector momentum. iResearch shows China's data middle platform market growing steadily, reaching RMB 12.6 billion in 2022, with growth rates remaining above 20% in 2023 and 2024. IDC reports similarly indicate that "the growing importance of data in modern enterprises," "the ongoing shift to public cloud," and "the rise of AI and machine learning in enterprise applications" — these three factors are driving expansion in the big data and analytics market. The Asia-Pacific big data and analytics software market grew 16% in the second half of 2022, with business intelligence and analytics tools and platforms projected to achieve a 23.6% CAGR from 2022-2026. The successive withdrawal of international software giants like Salesforce, Tableau, and Teradata from direct China operations, combined with emerging "domestic substitution" demand, is handing more market space to domestic independent third-party data technology vendors.

Undoubtedly, this increasingly mature yet steadily growing massive market awaits players like StartDT to make their mark.

"Moving toward enterprise-grade!" said Liu Ying, co-founder and COO of StartDT — a commitment and course of action toward clients, the market, capital, and society as StartDT enters a new phase.

Liu Ying is a "pure blue" IBM veteran, formerly executive assistant to an IBM global vice president. IBM, SAP, Oracle, Huawei... these are the benchmarks of excellence, once defining the era's understanding of "enterprise-grade": leading technology, reliable products, lean management, compliant operations, sustained service.

"These elements, in outcome terms, earned them clients' long-term trust, helped them adapt to market changes and transform, and achieved commercial success," Liu Ying observed.

Specifically, achieving "enterprise-grade" means having scalable service capabilities, supporting more client needs through mature standard products and services with consistently stable quality; and having high-quality revenue capabilities, with healthy revenue structure and cash flow supporting continuous product and technology upgrades and improved client service levels.

These two are not parallel tracks but mutually reinforcing, forming a virtuous, sustainable closed loop for B2B (enterprise service) companies.

Liu Ying explained: "Simply put, good products and services earn client recognition; client recognition gradually builds industry reputation; good reputation drives repurchases and new industry clients. Meanwhile, business recognition accompanies financial recognition — cash flow and financial performance become healthy, enabling more sustainable long-term client service. Of course, the product form must be replicable, modular, and standardized, distilled from best industry practices, to support sustainable scalable development."

StartDT "Enterprise-Grade" Strategy

As the "Big Blue" wasn't built in a day, Liu Ying noted, neither is "enterprise-grade" in the data intelligence domain achieved overnight.

In recent years, StartDT has consistently committed to providing clients with more stable, trustworthy, and reliable enterprise-grade products and services:

At the product level, adopting commercial release rules with clear version boundaries and continuous feature iteration, with full product lines possessing reliability, availability, and serviceability — meeting enterprise-grade complex data scenario needs under the premises of independent control and security compliance;

At the service level, providing consulting, operations, and indicator system construction as product support services, along with operational guarantees including "7×24 response, minute-level feedback, hour-level on-site presence, and continuity assurance."

Combining the advantages of agile iteration and waterfall development, StartDT adopts quarterly commercial releases

Following the GrowingIO merger and acquisition, StartDT also restructured its engineering production line to simultaneously support iteration of both SaaS products and on-premise deployment products, effectively improving R&D efficiency and response speed across the full product line, further ensuring software quality and optimizing value delivery to clients.

While vigorously investing in enterprise-grade product and service construction, StartDT is also focused on building a fully qualified and compliant management system, risk control guarantee system, and inheritable commercial strategy — emphasizing "cash collection-driven" operations (rather than over-weighting contract value or recognized revenue), using "enterprise-grade management" as the safeguard for maintaining the "reputation → trust" closed loop.

Currently, StartDT has passed authoritative certifications including CMMI Level 5 and DCMM Level 3 (as a vendor), been selected as a fourth-batch national-level "Little Giant" specialized and innovative enterprise, passed China Academy of Information and Communications Technology evaluations for "big data product capabilities" and "trusted privacy computing," and participated in drafting over ten standards including the Data Middle Platform Capability Maturity Framework and Big Data Intelligent Marketing Solution Technical Requirements. Simultaneously, it has pursued independent innovation, completing product compatibility certifications with domestic chip, operating system, and database vendors including Loongson, Huawei, Kylin Software, UnionTech Software, Kingbase, and Dameng — with performance efficiency and reliability results exceeding expectations.

Strategies and actions focused on product capability improvement, accelerated "enterprise-grade" deployment, and building the "reputation → trust" closed loop have yielded positive operational feedback for StartDT: consecutive years of doubled revenue growth, with 2022 revenue growth exceeding 120% despite pandemic impacts; continuously optimized revenue structure, with smart manufacturing revenue share growing 275% while maintaining retail sector advantages.

At the end of last year, the Opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on Building Data Fundamental Systems to Better Leverage Data Element Roles ("Data Twenty Articles") was released, signaling promotion of compliant and efficient data circulation and usage to empower the real economy. In early 2023, continuous news around "Digital China" and the "National Data Bureau" aimed to leverage data element roles and drive high-quality development, while also proposing requirements for the data technology market to move toward healthy and orderly development.

If 2023 is viewed as the "enterprise-grade inaugural year" for data intelligence, then for StartDT, and for vendors in this track hoping to accelerate clients' transition to data intelligence — this is only the beginning. Toward universalizing big data, toward greater trustworthiness, reliability, scalability, sustainability, and independent control: toward "enterprise-grade"!

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