5Y News｜HashData Raises $15 Million to Accelerate Cloud-Native Data Warehouse Development

五源资本·December 9, 2020

HashData has raised $15 million in an A++ round led by 5Y Capital.

Recently, Beijing Kuke Data Technology Co., Ltd. (HashData) announced it has raised $15 million across two rounds — an A+ and an A++ — bringing its total funding to that amount. The A+ round was led by GSR Ventures, with existing investor Matrix Partners China increasing its stake. The A++ round was led by 5Y Capital, with follow-on participation from GSR Ventures and Matrix Partners China. The new capital will go toward further product upgrades, deeper market expansion, and team building.

Lirong Jian

Co-founder & CEO, HashData

In the cloud data warehouse space, what contrarian thinking do you bring? What's the biggest market misconception about you?

Lirong Jian: I think the biggest market misconception about cloud data warehouses shows up in two ways:

Technically: Many people believe that as long as a data warehouse product is distributed and can run on cloud infrastructure, it qualifies as a cloud data warehouse. But that's really just the entry-level version.

Cloud platforms offer distinctive capabilities — virtually unlimited compute and storage resources (relative to any single data warehouse application), elastic scaling, and cost-efficient storage (especially object storage). Simply deploying a distributed data warehouse in the cloud doesn't mean you're actually leveraging these capabilities.

Two quick examples. First, data warehouses built on object storage are still rare in the market; most rely on block storage. When those block-storage-based warehouses move to the cloud, they can't take advantage of the cloud's cost-efficient storage tier. Second, if you spin up 100 new compute nodes on a cloud platform in one minute, traditional MPP architectures — with their tight compute-storage coupling — require data redistribution during expansion. Those 100 nodes might need six hours before they can join the existing cluster and process new queries. It's hard to say that product is really using the cloud's elastic scaling capabilities.

Commercially: Many people think cloud-native technology delivers the same value for data warehouses as it does for other infrastructure software.

I personally believe cloud data warehouses have unique value beyond just harnessing cloud computing's general benefits. A data warehouse holds a company's most commercially valuable historical data. And data is a resource with network amplification effects — similar to social networks — where combining two datasets can create far more value than the sum of their separate worths.

Looking ahead, we believe the evolution of big data technology isn't just about analyzing increasingly diverse data at lower cost and higher speed. More importantly, it's about building a platform where data can flow, trade, and merge conveniently and efficiently — within security and compliance boundaries — becoming a true factor of production. We firmly believe cloud data warehouses will play a major role in this historical process.

Since starting the company, what common sense or principles have become more important to you?

Lirong Jian: Thinking from a longer-term perspective has become increasingly important. When I need to make decisions with major impact on the company, I first ask myself: three years from now, five years from now, what milestone do I want the company to reach? And in moving toward that milestone, does today's decision introduce new risks or mitigate potential ones?

This mindset brings one benefit: many problems that seem critical in the moment look far less significant when viewed on a longer timescale, which helps avoid over-investing in finding optimal short-term solutions. The bigger benefit is that it helps me consistently choose the harder but correct path.

Recommend a book, movie, or TV series you enjoy?

Lirong Jian: The Moon and Sixpence by the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham.

There are many books worth recommending; this is one I read this year. As the book describes, what we're doing in foundational software entrepreneurship also requires some pure faith and pursuit.

Why did you choose 5Y Capital's investment?

Lirong Jian: Whether from what I've heard from other investors and entrepreneurs, read in the news, or experienced personally: 5Y Capital as an institution, and each person on its core team — including Richard, Elwin, Levi, and Chelsea — projects a sense of calm, composure, confidence, and level-headedness.

Based on my own experience, this temperament isn't simple "Buddhist-style" detachment. It comes from having ambitious long-term vision, formed naturally through extended study, deep research, and continuously elevated understanding. This is precisely the state that I and the company aspire to, and an important reason we ultimately chose 5Y Capital.

Kai Liu

Partner, 5Y Capital

Do you remember your first meeting with the HashData team? Any details that left an impression?

Kai Liu: I deliberately checked my WeChat history. I first met Lirong at the end of 2017. I can't recall the specific circumstances anymore, but what stuck with me was that three years ago, in our office, he was already animatedly telling me one thing: cloud data warehouses were developing rapidly in the US, and the opportunity in this space was enormous.

I'm embarrassed to say I probably didn't understand a word of it at the time. But his passion completely infected me, left a deep impression of the team, and motivated me to spend a lot of time researching and thinking about this. That was already three years ago.

Why did you invest in HashData?

Kai Liu: That meeting three years ago got us thinking from first principles about the value of cloud data warehouses. That's when we started paying attention to American companies like Snowflake and Databricks. I believe three years ago, these two companies were far from household names in China. But through deep research and visits, we developed conviction about this sector's value.

After that, we were waiting for China's market window to open, while meeting frequently with the team — which led to the natural partnership that followed. We're very bullish on the team's R&D accumulation in data warehousing and their industry experience with Chinese enterprises moving to the cloud.

Founded in early 2016, Kuke Data is among China's earliest startups focused exclusively on cloud data warehouses. Its core product, the HashData data warehouse, is built around object storage and abstracted services, combining the superior SQL functionality and performance of massively parallel processing (MPP) databases, the compute-storage separation philosophy of Hadoop/Spark, and the elasticity and scalability of cloud computing. This helps enterprise customers easily tackle challenges around concurrent access, reliability, usability, scalability, and cost in data warehouse, data lake, and data sharing implementations.

Currently, HashData has over 50 customers across financial services, telecommunications, energy, transportation, and internet sectors, including state-owned banks, policy banks, financial regulatory agencies, joint-stock commercial banks, the three major telecom operators, PetroChina, large port groups, Fortune 500 China branches, and internet SaaS companies. Beyond its fully managed public cloud data warehouse service, HashData also supports private and hybrid cloud deployments tailored to China's IT and business environment, delivering services through partnerships with cloud providers, object storage vendors, systems integrators, and application solution providers.

Before founding HashData, Lirong Jian worked at IBM China Research Lab, Yahoo! Beijing Global R&D Center, and Pivotal China R&D Center, focusing on cloud computing, Hadoop, and distributed database R&D. Lirong believes the fundamental drivers behind the cloud-native data warehouse trend are: first, cloud computing is the inevitable direction — whether public, private, or hybrid cloud, all infrastructure software will migrate to cloud platforms, data warehouses included; second, cloud computing provides the foundation for solving traditional data warehouse problems, including elasticity, scalability, and usability; third, only data warehouses built entirely around object storage and abstracted services can fully exploit cloud computing's advantages.

HashData's core team consists mainly of senior experts in cloud computing, distributed databases, and big data from Pivotal, Teradata, IBM, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Huawei, with extensive experience across product R&D, post-sales technical support, pre-sales solutions, and sales and marketing. They have served or are currently serving over a hundred Fortune 500 companies including General Electric, Walmart, Bank of America, Veolia, China Mobile, China Construction Bank, PetroChina, and Haier.

5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately $3 billion across USD and RMB dual-currency funds. We believe the world would be a better place if the crazy you that others see starts to be believed.

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