Distributed relational database company PingCAP closes $15 million Series B, with FreeS Fund continuing to participate | Funding News
PingCAP builds open-source databases that change the future, freeing backend developers from drudgery.
On June 13, 2017, PingCAP, a global distributed relational database company, announced the completion of its $15 million Series B funding round, led by China Growth Capital, with FreeS Fund (FREES FUND) following up after its earlier Series A investment. This round will help PingCAP accelerate R&D, commercialization, and provide ample support for the company's globalization strategy.
From the Investors
Ju Zhang
Director at FreeS Fund, Head of Early and Growth Stage Projects
Investment focus: Enterprise IT, security
Email: ju@freesvc.com
Capable, dream-driven, and passionate — a group of young people undaunted by difficulty, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into tackling problems widely recognized as among the hardest in software engineering. In just three years, they've built a world-leading open-source distributed database project, earning due recognition both technically and commercially. Congratulations to the PingCAP team on this new funding round. Wishing them even greater success on the path that is "right, not easy."
Building the Open-Source Database That Changes the Future, Liberating Backend Developers
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Beijing, PingCAP is dedicated to technological innovation in cutting-edge infrastructure. Its core technical team includes numerous top-tier programmers from around the world, among them the authors of well-known open-source software such as Codis and SenseiDB. Its flagship product, TiDB, tackles the long-standing world-class challenge of horizontal scalability for relational databases, and stands as one of the most technically competitive products in this space globally.
▲ PingCAP's core product, TiDB.
At the strategic level, PingCAP firmly believes that open source is the only viable path to success for infrastructure software in today's globalized context. In Silicon Valley, virtually all foundational software that leads world technology trends is open-source by strategy, and numerous enterprises have chosen open-source technology stacks to build their core businesses. From day one, PingCAP has been unwavering in its commitment to open source, with the goal of becoming a world-class infrastructure software company.
Leveraging Cutting-Edge Technology to Capture the Market, Accelerating Commercialization
In just two years since its founding, PingCAP's formidable technical capabilities have drawn significant industry attention. The TiDB project has garnered 10,000+ Stars on GitHub, the world's most popular open-source code hosting platform, and has attracted over 150 contributors from around the globe — making it the most successful star open-source project in the global data storage field. By the numbers: TiDB's single test cluster has broken through 200 TB, completing tests on 500+ nodes; in test cluster environments, it has achieved million-level QPS on Sysbench, with seamless linear scalability as nodes are added.
▲ PingCAP has garnered 10,000+ Stars on GitHub.
On the commercialization front, TiDB has made equally rapid progress. It currently has 200+ users in pre-production testing, with dozens of leading enterprises across various industries already deployed — including Mobike, Tongcheng Travel, 360 Finance, Xindong Network, and Gaea Interactive. With TiDB's support, gaming companies no longer need to frequently take their services offline for data maintenance; financial firms face no risk of data loss even during data center power outages; and e-commerce platforms no longer need months of advance drill exercises to shard databases and add middleware before major promotional events, freeing DBA teams from the nightmare of database scaling. Meanwhile, PingCAP has established deep partnerships with multiple top-tier cloud service providers, further accelerating its cloud migration.
TiDB's emergence has disrupted the established database market. In today's environment of rapid internet growth, its core capabilities can both easily handle surging enterprise data volumes and satisfy traditional enterprises' transactional processing needs, making it an ideal database cluster and cloud database solution for the big data era. TiDB's official commercial release is expected in the near future.
▲ PingCAP co-founder and CEO Qi Liu.
