Source Code Capital portfolio company StreamNative announced the completion of a $23 million Series A funding round, with existing shareholder Source Code Capital continuing to increase its investment.

源码资本·October 12, 2021·0·5

Driving sustainable development in open-source communities and helping enterprises achieve digital transformation.

On October 12, Beijing time, cloud-native batch-and-stream unified data platform StreamNative announced a $23 million Series A round. The round was co-led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified venture capital arm of Saudi Aramco, and Huatai Innovation, the alternative investment subsidiary of Huatai Securities. Existing shareholders HSG and Source Code Capital also increased their stakes. StreamNative had previously raised several million dollars in a Pre-A round in August 2020, led by Source Code Capital with participation from HSG Seed Fund; the founding team received angel investment from HSG Seed Fund when it launched in 2019.

StreamNative co-founder and CEO Sijie Guo said the new funding will go toward product R&D and talent acquisition, strengthening investment in messaging, stream storage, and stream processing technologies, and accelerating product iteration and customer growth.

Cloud-Native Messaging and Streaming System — Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar, a top-level project at the Apache Software Foundation, integrates messaging, storage, and lightweight computing into a cloud-native messaging and streaming system. Pulsar has maintained rapid growth and strong momentum: its main repository now has 450 contributors globally, up more than 45% year over year, with monthly active contributors rivaling or exceeding Apache Kafka. It also ranked on the ASF's 2021 annual report list of most active projects by commits and clones.

StreamNative co-founder Jia Zhai

Apache Pulsar uses a cloud-native architecture with separated storage and compute, natively supporting large clusters, multi-tenancy, millions of topics, geo-replication, persistent storage, and tiered storage. It provides a unified consumption model supporting both message queue and stream processing scenarios — delivering enterprise-grade read/write quality of service and strict consistency for queue use cases, while offering extremely high throughput for streaming. Enterprises can use Apache Pulsar to build a unified real-time data infrastructure platform, breaking down data silos, simplifying architecture, and reducing operational complexity.

Apache Pulsar has been deployed at hundreds of enterprises domestically and abroad, including Tencent, Baidu, China Mobile, China Telecom Group Co., Ltd., China UnionPay, Ping An Securities, BestPay, Lakala, Huawei Cloud, Kingsoft Cloud, Zhihu, BIGO, Dada Nexus, Tuya Smart, and others, spanning financial securities, transaction and payment, live streaming and short video, e-commerce, and IoT.

Chen Runze of Source Code Capital said: "As digitalization deepens across industries, 'streaming' has become the primary form of interaction between enterprises and the outside world — more and more transactional, operational, behavioral, sensor, and event data is pouring into enterprises as continuous streams. Processing this data effectively is increasingly critical for agile and efficient operations. At the same time, cloud migration of digital infrastructure is irreversible, and cloud-native transformation of PaaS-layer software is a must. Apache Pulsar is the representative of cloud-native streaming data platforms. The StreamNative team brings together outstanding developers from the Pulsar community, and is committed to driving sustainable open-source community development while leveraging commercial forces to provide better digital infrastructure for more enterprises. We believe StreamNative will help an growing number of customers succeed in their digital transformation."

Championing Community Leadership, Building a Rich Ecosystem

StreamNative was founded by the original Apache Pulsar team. Co-founders Sijie Guo, Jia Zhai, and Matteo Merli are all active Pulsar PMC members and open-source advocates, with Matteo currently serving as Pulsar PMC Chair. The team has attracted numerous active Pulsar developers, further strengthening StreamNative's role and influence as a community leader.

StreamNative oversees community building and maintenance, regularly hosting livestreams and offline meetups, publishing user case studies and technical blog posts; it organizes and hosts global community summits and hackathons, with summits now covering North America, Europe, and Asia; it handles community user technical support and relationship management, and plans and drives implementation of major Pulsar feature proposals.

At the same time, StreamNative is actively building out the Apache Pulsar ecosystem, independently or with partners releasing open-source ecosystem projects such as KoP (Kafka-on-Pulsar), Function Mesh, and the Pulsar Flink Connector, and launching StreamNative Hub to provide more Pulsar upstream and downstream system connectors and plugins.

Refining Cloud-Native Products and Services, Rapid Commercial Growth at Home and Abroad

StreamNative officially launched StreamNative Cloud, a cloud-native batch-and-stream unified data platform based on Apache Pulsar, last August, offering rich data processing and computing capabilities. With StreamNative Cloud, users no longer need to maintain complex systems on-premises and can focus more on core business applications and microservices development. It currently supports deployment on Google Cloud Platform, AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud (in public beta).

Recently, StreamNative also released StreamNative Platform, an on-premise deployment product that meets enterprises' heightened compliance needs for data security and privacy while being ready to use out of the box, freeing users from complex infrastructure operations.

Currently, StreamNative serves dozens of global clients including Wealth Global 100 companies, such as US e-commerce post-purchase platform Narvar, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing technology services company Applied Materials, India's largest e-commerce platform Flipkart, a multinational automotive manufacturing group, and Chinese securities and financial services firms.

Mapping the Roadmap: Technology, Product, and Talent as a Triad

On the technology front, StreamNative will strengthen Apache Pulsar's messaging and streaming platform capabilities while pushing integration with data lake technologies such as Databricks' Delta Lake and Apache Hudi, supporting their batch reads of data stored in Apache Pulsar to enable near-real-time data access via Spark, AWS Redshift, and Presto/Trino. StreamNative will also continue building and improving Apache Pulsar connectors for Flink and Spark to better support batch-and-stream unified solutions.

On the product front, the focus will be on improving StreamNative Platform's on-premise deployment services, strengthening service and expansion for financial services and IoT industry customers, and helping traditional enterprises with digital transformation; optimizing the StreamNative Cloud experience, accelerating deployment on domestic cloud providers, and better supporting multi-cloud environments.

On the team front, StreamNative has already built an elastic, agile, high-performance team working fully remotely, with domestic members distributed across multiple cities and regions, and engineers maintaining roughly 80% of headcount. Team size is expected to triple next year to strengthen investment in the Apache Pulsar community, ecosystem, and StreamNative commercial products and services.**