BlueRun Ventures Continues to Double Down: Yanhuang Data Announces Completion of Over 100 Million Yuan Series A1 and A1+ Rounds | BlueRun Ventures
Focused on heterogeneous data processing and real-time analytics
Recently, Yanhuang Data, a heterogeneous big data analytics engine company, announced the completion of its Series A1 and A1+ funding rounds. The A1 round was led by Langmafeng Venture Capital, with Rongyi Capital participating, while existing investors BlueRun Ventures and Sunyard Technology continued their support. The A1+ round was funded by Wuxi Xinshang Capital, a government guidance fund. The two rounds combined exceeded the company's current-stage fundraising expectations, totaling over RMB 100 million.
Shi Jianping, Investment Partner at BlueRun Ventures, stated: As an early investor in Yanhuang Data, BlueRun Ventures is honored to witness the company's growth. After more than a year of development, the product's functionality and performance have been validated through initial proof-of-concept deployments with large enterprise customers. Yanhuang Data's cloud-native architecture and "schema-on-read" technology significantly lower the barriers to data preparation and management, a value proposition that has gained customer recognition. The company has begun accelerating its ecosystem partnerships and commercialization efforts. We believe that technology-driven Yanhuang Data will become an outstanding commercial company through its independently controllable big data products.
He Ning, Chairman of the company, said that proceeds from this round will primarily fund the launch of a community edition of its product, team expansion, strengthened community operations, and commercial deployment.
This funding comes less than a year after Yanhuang Data's previous round. Founded in 2020, the company focuses on heterogeneous data processing and has launched an instant analytics platform for heterogeneous data. According to the company, data can be categorized into three types: structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Structured data is typically stored in traditional relational databases and represents the most widely used mainstream database format. However, the processing needs for semi-structured and unstructured data cannot be overlooked. Ye Xiaolu, CEO of Yanhuang, noted that in new scenarios such as the Internet of Everything, unstructured data accounts for 80% of generated data, and Yanhuang's distinguishing capability lies in processing time-series, text-based unstructured, and semi-structured data.
From an industry perspective, Ye Xiaolu, CEO of Yanhuang Data, said that Splunk was previously the company with such data processing capabilities, and there is also the open-source product ElasticSearch in the industry, but Yanhuang is the only domestic company focused on this space. In terms of implementation, Yanhuang's product is distinguished by converting the traditional ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process to ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), and combining schema-on-write with schema-on-read to create a cutting-edge hybrid modeling solution.
Typically, unstructured data must go through a relatively cumbersome process of extraction, cleansing, transformation, and loading — the ETL process — before it can be used. Yanhuang eliminates data cleansing, generally the most time-consuming and labor-intensive step, transforming ETL into ELT. This means that Yanhuang's compute engine accesses raw, uncleansed data, reducing cleansing costs for customers during data processing. In the modeling process that makes data usable by business personnel on demand, Yanhuang provides a more flexible schema-on-read approach, where data is modeled during the read process by business users, offering greater flexibility than schema-on-write. Additionally, for models with higher usage frequency, schema-on-read can be converted to schema-on-write for stabilization.
In terms of overall effectiveness, Ye Xiaolu gave an example: in data query scenarios, business personnel can relatively quickly find the data they need through iterative refinement of their searches. Compared to traditional cleansing and upfront modeling, this process saves considerable time and better aligns with the flexible, rapidly changing business needs of the digital era. He stated that Yanhuang's platform can generally fulfill requests with sub-second response times, depending on the volume of ingested data.
To summarize from a technical standpoint, the platform uses schema-on-read and ELT as its core, integrating schema-on-write capabilities to provide processing, analysis, and visualization of heterogeneous big data while avoiding cumbersome ETL. The conversion from ETL to ELT essentially achieves data cleansing-free operation. Compared to schema-on-write, schema-on-read does not follow a fixed path of writing data first and then reading and analyzing it, enabling more flexible and efficient modeling.
On the commercialization front, Ye Xiaolu said that Yanhuang Data's current customers are primarily distributed across the broad financial sector, IoT (such as new energy vehicle companies), and the broad government sector, with various data-sensitive departments also being target groups under exploration. Overall, the company began its commercialization process in September last year and has already accumulated more than 10 industry-leading customers including Ping An, ZhongAn, State Grid Corporation of China, and Knowledge Planet.
In terms of business model, to accommodate enterprises of all sizes, the company has developed several packaged feature combinations: Community Edition, Professional Edition, and SaaS Edition. For pricing, Yanhuang Data charges based on usage metrics, with flexible billing based on daily data ingestion volume or vCPU count, more closely matching the needs of different users.
Regarding the use of proceeds from this funding round, Ye Xiaolu said one priority is supporting the launch of the Community Edition product, and the other is team expansion; Yanhuang Data's biggest strategy this year is launching a free community edition of its product, a lightweight version where users can access all core product features. The Community Edition is currently in internal testing. After its launch, the company will establish a community of data analysts, data scientists, and IT technical personnel. Maintaining and operating this community is also an important use of this round's funding.
Finally, on the team: Yanhuang Data's core founding team all come from Splunk, the global big data analytics engine company. Chairman He Ning was formerly Splunk's Global VP and General Manager of Shanghai R&D Center; CEO Ye Xiaolu was formerly Deputy General Manager of Splunk Shanghai R&D Center; CTO Wang Guodong and Chief Architect Ni Yue were both formerly Product Architects at Splunk China R&D Center. Following this funding round, Yanhuang Data will continue building its talent pipeline to meet more customers' heterogeneous data processing needs.
More Content
BlueRun Ventures was founded in 1998 in Silicon Valley. BlueRun Ventures China was established in 2005 and is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.
Currently, BlueRun Ventures China manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds in China. The firm invests primarily at Pre-A and Series A stages, with coverage across hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumer, and healthcare sectors. It has cumulatively invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, Yunsheng Intelligence, Anxin Network Shield, and BioMap.
BlueRun Ventures has been ranked #1 in Zero2IPO's "China Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions" and ChinaVenture's "China Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions TOP30," and was named among Preqin's Top 10 venture capital fund managers globally for sustained high-return performance.
Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has received consecutive recognition from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations as "China's Best Early-Stage Institution of the Year," "China Top Venture Capital Firm," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Institution of the Year," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Institution of the Year."