Database startup **Chengzhang Data** has raised tens of millions of RMB in an angel round led by **Linear Capital** | Linear News

Zheng Can, Managing Director of Linear Capital, said: "Data analytics and management platform software, with databases as a representative example, is a highly prosperous market with enormous potential. At the same time, it's a crowded space with fierce competition. To win in this domain requires leading-edge technology and excellent products. The founding team of Data Substrate (成章数据) is one of the few expert teams in China with experience leading the architecture of large-scale commercial data systems, possessing deep understanding and long-term thinking about databases, distributed systems, and cloud computing. The Data Substrate concept proposed by Data Substrate is a forward-looking architecture for database and data management systems, one that could very well bring disruptive innovation and transformation to the industry. Linear Capital is pleased to support this team at an early stage and looks forward to long-term collaboration with them to advance data infrastructure."

36Kr has learned that database startup "Data Substrate" recently announced the completion of its angel round. According to the company, this round raised tens of millions of RMB, with Linear Capital as the investor. The funding will be used for product development and team building.

Data Substrate was founded in 2021 as a startup focused on the database sector.

On the motivation for starting the company, founder and CEO Dr. Chen Liang explained that as business scenarios evolve, data management systems have grown increasingly complex. Today's database systems face a series of challenges: ever-growing data volumes, higher real-time requirements, multiple data modalities, cost-performance tradeoffs, dynamic resource scaling, cross-datacenter disaster recovery, and more. These unprecedented complexities conflict with traditional databases' requirements for ACID transactional consistency and high reliability.

On another front, whether databases should move toward greater unification or further fragmentation remains a topic of debate. On this, Chen Liang noted that traditional databases can no longer satisfy the complex data business needs of modern enterprises. In recent years, many database companies have seen this opportunity and made various attempts. However, current solutions tend to optimize for a single workload (such as real-time data analytics) or a single data modality (such as streaming data), which inevitably leads to operational complexity and market fragmentation. To address these issues, Data Substrate hopes to blaze a new trail through systems architecture innovation, proposing the concept of Data Substrate as a foundation for future data management system architectures.

On Data Substrate, he explained that the concept emerged from the team's years of architectural thinking about databases. The underlying architectures of different database products require many similar components—including transaction management, distributed fault tolerance, elastic scaling, and so on—while the differentiated parts "may only account for 10% to 20%." Therefore, by abstracting the common functions across different databases, Data Substrate establishes a unified data foundation for functionally diverse databases through a modular approach with standardized APIs. In terms of results, he stated that Data Substrate's architecture can unify database foundational functions without sacrificing performance, using decoupling to assemble modules with different capabilities and rapidly build more flexible databases adaptable to different scenarios and applications, thereby meeting users' increasingly complex data needs.

Currently, Data Substrate is also leveraging Data Substrate technology to build a new-generation relational OLTP database featuring modularity, cloud-native architecture, high performance, multi-modality support, and pluggable compute and storage engines. Chen Liang also noted that OLTP is just the beginning. Data Substrate hopes to validate Data Substrate's advantages by starting with the most complex and difficult OLTP workload, then build upon this foundation to develop database products supporting other modalities (such as graph data, streaming data, etc.) and multiple storage engines (such as row storage, column storage).

On progress, the company's product is currently in development, with plans to launch the new product within this year.

On the team side, founder and CEO Dr. Chen Liang received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in computer science from UC San Diego, with over a decade of research and work experience in the database field. Before founding Data Substrate, Chen Liang served as Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, where he led the architecture of the graph database engine for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB and was also one of the core developers of Microsoft SQL Server XML Index. He has published multiple academic papers at top database conferences including VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE. Data Substrate's founding members come from Microsoft Research Asia and Pivotal Greenplum. The engineering team hails from leading companies including Alibaba, Baidu, Xiaomi, Kuaishou, Amazon, and Zhihu, and graduated from renowned institutions at home and abroad including Tsinghua University, Peking University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Beihang University, Beijing Institute of Technology, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

For more analysis on Linear Capital's investment in Data Substrate, you can also watch the video below, "Why We Invested in a Database Company."

About Linear Capital

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Linear Capital is a professional investment institution focused on "Data Intelligence" and "Frontier Technology."

Linear Capital currently manages ten funds with total AUM of approximately $2 billion.

We focus on early-stage projects in "Data Application," "Data Infrastructure," and "Frontier Technology" application areas. Our investment stage is primarily lead investing from angel to Series A, with typical check sizes of $3-8 million or RMB equivalent.

To date, we have made early-stage investments in over 120 startup teams including Horizon Robotics ($3B valuation), Tongdun (>$1B), Kujiale (>$1B), Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, Agile Robots, and others. The combined valuation of Linear Capital's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier "Data Intelligence Technology Fund," and in the long term, to gradually build itself into the most influential "Frontier Technology Application Fund."