5Y News | "Tapdata Secures Tens of Millions of USD Across Two Consecutive Rounds, Carving Out a New Track in Real-Time Data Services"

Tapdata, a real-time data service platform company focused on enterprise OLTP workloads (Shenzhen Taibo Data Co., Ltd., hereafter referred to as "Tapdata"), announced the completion of its Pre-A round led exclusively by 5Y Capital and its Pre-A+ round jointly led by XVC and Delian Capital, with total investment reaching tens of millions of USD. YuanYi Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for both rounds. Proceeds from both financings will be used primarily for continued R&D investment. Previously, Tapdata had raised nearly RMB 10 million in angel funding from a consortium of angel investors including Bianliang Capital and Blue Ocean Capital.

Liu Kai, Partner at 5Y Capital, commented: "Tapdata's data processing product for OLTP scenarios has opened up an undeveloped blue-ocean market. Currently, the only well-known vendors in the DaaS space are Dremio and Tibco in the U.S. Strictly speaking, Tapdata is the pioneer of real-time DaaS in China, and we value its technical sophistication and product scarcity. Moreover, approximately 80% of the global database market serves TP data scenarios, so we are very optimistic about this sector's growth potential."

TJ Tang

Founder & CEO, Tapdata

Q1

Why did you found Tapdata?

TJ Tang: In the years before starting the company, I worked at MongoDB, spending much of my time guiding users to migrate from legacy database technologies to next-generation distributed database systems.

Through this work, I engaged with a wide variety of customers across different industries and of different scales, each with diverse business needs. Most of the time, as a MongoDB advocate, I was actually unsuccessful. In the end, users might adopt distributed MySQL (for large-scale transactional workloads), Hadoop (for big data analytics), PostgreSQL (for de-IOE Oracle replacement), or Elasticsearch (for log analysis). But what I observed was that, setting aside cost and commercial factors, people would rationally choose the storage solution best suited to their specific needs and scenarios.

A decade ago, database choices were like beverages on a store shelf — just a few options. Today you walk into a 7-Eleven and find dozens of drinks to choose from; modern databases outnumber beverage varieties. The critical point is that whichever database you use, users find themselves struggling to figure out how to migrate data from their existing systems into the new one — and this is rarely a one-time task; it needs to be done continuously. When customers would ask me, with genuine puzzlement, how they could get their customer or order data into this shiny new distributed document database without decommissioning their legacy systems, and keep incrementally syncing updates into MongoDB, I found myself thinking, more than once: if only there were a data architecture like a water pipe — when I need data, instead of lugging it around by hand, I could just turn on a faucet and the data would flow. What an experience that would be! That's the background behind founding Tapdata.

Q2

What are Tapdata platform's core capabilities, and what value does it deliver?

TJ Tang: Tapdata's core capability is providing enterprises with a real-time data service platform that delivers the freshest, most complete data services for various new data-driven business initiatives. Regardless of how many business systems an enterprise currently operates or how many different databases it uses, Tapdata can connect them in a simple manner, using log-based sync and data virtualization technology to build a logical, virtual, unified data access layer for the enterprise. This way, when an enterprise needs data, it only has to go to one centralized location and, through Tapdata's standardized interfaces (tap), can easily and conveniently access the data it needs.

Depending on customers' digital maturity, Tapdata delivers different value to two types of clients:

The first type comprises enterprises at relatively early stages of digitalization, those that have not yet built data warehouses, data lakes, or similar data platform architectures.

For these users, Tapdata can serve as the enterprise's first data platform or foundation, quickly aggregating data from various business systems through drag-and-drop operations to solve data silo problems. Combined with Tapdata's built-in data catalog, data version management, data lineage, and data analytics capabilities, Tapdata itself can function as a data platform satisfying both AP and TP data workloads.

The second type comprises relatively mature enterprises that have already built at least one data warehouse or big data platform.

For these enterprises, Tapdata can supplement their data architecture with real-time data processing capabilities, such as real-time data warehouses, real-time data dashboards, and real-time data centers. Additionally, Tapdata can serve as a front-end architecture for these data platforms, replacing traditional SQL scripts or offline ETL tools to help customers accomplish real-time data collection, visual ETL development, real-time analytics and computational modeling, and output results into their existing data platforms.

Q3

What "contrarian" thinking do you have about the database industry?

TJ Tang: I remember when I first started working on this, I consulted several good friends in the industry. Most of them offered very pertinent opinions and concerns about the technical architecture. In fact, they were all right — what they worried about were indeed major pitfalls we encountered during execution. Last year, I spent many sleepless nights with team colleagues due to the pressure from technical challenges after product launch. But I still clearly remember that after receiving this very honest feedback, I felt that the significance of what we were doing had actually grown.

If what you're doing isn't difficult enough, if the problem you're solving isn't painful enough, then there's no reason to give up comfortable compensation and quit your job to start a company. It's this kind of uncertain risk that gives what we're doing greater purpose and life value.

Q4

Why did you choose 5Y Capital's investment?

TJ Tang: What we're building is more of an infrastructure-oriented middleware product. The characteristics are high barriers but large capital requirements, slow market adoption, and the need for investors with greater foresight and deep industry insight to run the long race with us.

In our interactions with Levi (Liu Kai) and Chelsea (Yan Zhuyi) at 5Y Capital, within just two meetings we sensed their industry acumen and understanding of data products. Particularly regarding the value of DaaS — not the most mainstream data architecture — we found strong consensus. Their quick, decisive execution and their previous portfolio also helped us make our decision rapidly.

Tapdata was founded in September 2019, focusing on the Data as a Service (Real Time DaaS) track, providing real-time data platform services for enterprise TP workloads with millisecond-level response times.

The company was founded by TJ Tang (唐建法), former Chief Architect for Greater China at MongoDB and Chairman of the MongoDB Chinese Community. Core team members come from MongoDB, Oracle, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and other leading technology companies.

Tapdata's core technical capabilities include: data virtualization based on data synchronization, stream processing engine + visual data development platform, low-code API publishing capability, and unified heterogeneous data source access framework. Accordingly, Tapdata's core competitive advantages can be summarized as upgraded user experience, simple architecture, lightweight deployment, low cost, and quick onboarding, specifically:

First, through data virtualization technology, users barely need to be aware of data's physical location — at a single entry point, using one method, they can access core data actually residing in various business systems and different types of databases. This approach dramatically improves the enterprise data access experience.

Second, lightweight on-premise deployment: Tapdata can be deployed in customer data centers or private cloud environments, achieving real-time data sync capability with just three virtual machines, and supports nearly 30 data sources including Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and others;

Third, visual data development: from connecting data sources to building the first model takes just minutes, with drag-and-drop rapid creation of wide tables or other data models, with no code required for most scenarios;

Fourth, no-code API publishing: data can be published via RESTful or RPC through simple configuration, with a searchable, classifiable data catalog provided for DaaS-managed data.

Tapdata operates on a subscription-based service model, with floating fees based on the number of modules subscribed to, and corresponding customer contract values ranging from RMB 200,000 to over RMB 1 million. In terms of customer engagement, the company conducts POC testing upfront, with average project delivery cycles of 2-3 months. For customer acquisition, Tapdata initially leveraged foundational communities for conversion. Founder and CEO TJ is an active knowledge contributor in open-source communities, with numerous database engineers learning about Tapdata's products through community platforms and converting to customers. Going forward, Tapdata will primarily expand through direct sales and channel partnerships with technically capable teams.

On business progress, Tapdata achieved revenue exceeding RMB 10 million in 2020 and has reached break-even. In terms of customer partnerships, Tapdata has built reference accounts including China Mobile, FAW, Chow Sang Sang, TCL, China Southern Power Grid, Fubon Bank, and others, continuously iterating its products through these collaborations.

Regarding its relationship with various cloud data warehouses, big data platforms, and data center vendors, Tapdata Founder and CEO TJ stated that the product's core capabilities lie in real-time connectivity across multi-source heterogeneous databases, drag-and-drop data development, and low-code data publishing and push capabilities. It can serve as a front-end architecture for various cloud data warehouses, big data platforms, and data centers, providing data collection and synchronization, processing and transformation, various visual modeling capabilities, and ultimately landing data into these warehouses or centers, becoming a partner to various vendors. Currently, two data center vendors have established strategic partnerships with Tapdata and delivered multiple projects.

On openness, open-source, and accelerating adoption of real-time DaaS architecture, Tapdata has already initiated a roadmap to open-source some core capabilities, and recently launched its free cloud product, Tapdata Cloud. Tapdata Cloud is currently in public beta, offering the heterogeneous database real-time sync module from Tapdata's product suite, enabling real-time synchronization among dozens of heterogeneous databases and providing production-grade support for many new business scenarios including business expansion, cache acceleration, and database backup and disaster recovery. The company stated this released version will remain permanently free, allowing more users to experience the value of real-time data and understand the advantages of Real Time DaaS architecture. Previously, Tapdata's cloud sync technology had already partnered deeply with China Mobile's public cloud, providing cloud migration and cross-cloud sync capabilities for various heterogeneous databases on Mobile Cloud.

5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately USD 5 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe that if the crazy you in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world becomes a better place.

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