Zetta Technology Completes New Funding Round, Launches Distributed HTAP Database KunlunBase | BlueRun Ventures

Zetta Tech, a distributed HTAP database startup, recently announced the completion of a new funding round, with Fosun Wealth as the new investor and existing shareholder Ivy Capital continuing to increase its stake. The proceeds will primarily go toward product R&D and team building.

BlueRun Ventures was the lead investor in Zetta Tech's angel round.

Founded in 2020, Zetta Tech is a startup focused on cloud-native distributed HTAP databases. Specifically, its product is positioned as a next-generation distributed database, aiming to become a specialist in massive data storage and management, high-concurrency OLTP transaction processing, and OLAP real-time data analytics.

According to the company, founder and CEO Wei Zhao and his core R&D team have nearly two decades of deep experience in the database field, having long been responsible for cloud database kernel design and development at Oracle, Tencent, Huawei, Alibaba, and other companies. They were core frontline developers and technical experts for MySQL and the main database products of various domestic public cloud providers, with deep understanding of database system theory, technology, and user requirements.

On the motivation for starting the company, Zhao said that databases globally have evolved from single-machine to distributed architectures, and from on-premise deployment to the cloud. At this moment, with the rise of HTAP databases that merge OLTP and OLAP, and the cloud service era for databases, users have higher demands for data value and the continuity of their business systems. However, the industry as a whole remains in the early stages of distributed HTAP database development, and the penetration rate of domestically controllable OLTP database products in China is still relatively low. Therefore, drawing on the experience of its core team in building multiple flagship database products at major public cloud companies, the Zetta Tech team aims to develop a high-performance, highly available financial-grade distributed HTAP database product — KunlunBase — to serve global customers.

Zhao noted that after more than two years of R&D, KunlunBase released version 1.0 in August 2022 and currently has seed customers, with multiple customer POCs running in parallel. Overall, financial-grade high performance and high availability are KunlunBase's defining characteristics, corresponding to the database's security, stability, and smooth support capabilities.

Zhao stated that KunlunBase is positioned to address the technical challenges of massive data storage management and utilization in high-concurrency, high-load transaction processing (TP) scenarios. Moreover, KunlunBase is designed to provide enterprise-grade, distributed, elastically scalable, and financial-grade highly reliable database capabilities to community edition users of MySQL and PostgreSQL. The product also aims to expand into new analytics scenarios, supporting analysis with the latest business data to uncover business value.

Zhao explained that KunlunBase uses MySQL-based storage nodes, while its PostgreSQL-based compute nodes are an industry first. Overall, KunlunBase extends the capabilities of these two most widely used open-source single-machine database products globally (based on DB-Engines rankings), enabling their users to manage petabyte-scale data volumes with elastic scaling and financial-grade high availability.

KunlunBase's basic working principle involves distributed query processing of SQL queries sent by clients at the compute nodes, parsing, optimizing, and executing queries. Through data sharding and mapping mechanisms, it locates the storage cluster where each row of data resides, then interacts with storage nodes to complete data reads and writes. During distributed transaction processing, it ensures that any transaction can read and write across multiple storage clusters with full ACID guarantees. KunlunBase's storage nodes are responsible for user data storage and queries, implementing a fullsync replication mechanism required for extreme financial-grade availability. Multiple KunlunBase modules work together organically to accomplish elastic scaling, financial-grade high availability mechanisms, and other core functions.

Additionally, Zetta Tech is currently intensifying its efforts to build a community ecosystem, with the goal of continuously driving product iteration through community models. Zhao emphasized that an active developer ecosystem is equally important as a user ecosystem — based on excellent product performance, a large user base can gradually convert into paying customers. Currently, the KunlunBase user community has reached several thousand people, with software downloads exceeding 10,000 and documentation views surpassing 100,000.

Separately, the KunlunBase team decided at the end of March 2023 to gradually adopt a new product name and trademark: Klustron. Zhao noted that the specific related announcement can be found in the news section of Zetta Tech's official website.

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Originating in Silicon Valley, BlueRun Ventures was established in 2005 as a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

Currently, BlueRun Ventures manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds in China, with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds domestically. Its investment stage focuses on Pre-A and Series A rounds, covering 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, YTMicro, Machenike, CloudSaints, Anxinnet, BioMap, and others.

BlueRun Ventures has been ranked first in Zero2IPO's "Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions in China" and ChinaVenture's "Top 30 Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions in China," and was named among Preqin's Top 10 Global VC Fund Managers for Sustained High Returns.

Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has for multiple consecutive years received honors from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations, including "China's Best Early-Stage Institution of the Year," "China's Top Venture Capital Institution," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Institution of the Year," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Institution of the Year."