On May 24, 2021, Taos Data, a leading big data platform for the Internet of Things (IoT), announced that it has closed a $47 million Series B funding round. This round of financing was led by Jingwei China, followed by Sequoia Capital China Fund, GGV Capital and Index Capital, and Index Capital acted as the exclusive financial adviser. The financing funds will be mainly used for technology research and development and market expansion.
Taos Data was founded in 2017, focusing on the storage, query, analysis and calculation of big data in time series space. It does not rely on any open source or third-party software, and has developed a high-performance, scalable, highly reliable and zero-management Internet of Things big data platform TDEngine with independent intellectual property rights, which can be widely used in the Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles, industrial Internet, IT operation and maintenance and other fields. Tdengine was officially open source in July 2019, and cluster version was open source again in August 2020. Tdengine has ranked first on GitHub’s global trend list for many times, and has gained 15000+ stars and more than 3800 forks, making it the most popular open source project. In January 2020, we got nearly ten million dollars of pre-A round financing from GGV Capital, Sequoia China Seed Fund and Yong Pfizer Gold. In April 2020, we got more than ten million dollars of A-round financing from Sequoia Capital China Fund and GGV Capital.
The world’s leading technology & product capabilities that define the core infrastructure of the next generation IoT
The products of Taos Data are highly standardized, do not require custom development, and are rapidly replicated around the world, with remote delivery and deployment in pure software form. Its IT infrastructure platform is positioned to fully carry customers’ Internet of Things big data application scenarios, and can deeply bind customers’ Internet of Things business for a long time, becoming a unique infrastructure.
Tdengine Internet of Things big data platform independently developed by Taos Data has extreme performance, which can improve data insertion and query response speed by 10 times +; User friendly, support C/C++, Java, Python and other interfaces, without third-party software can be installed directly, learning to use zero cost; Rich ecology, perfect technology ecology built for the characteristics of the Internet of Things does not need to integrate surrounding components, out of the box, perfectly compatible with all kinds of IT environments and applications; The All In One solution significantly simplifies the system architecture and reduces operational and maintenance costs. Compared with the existing technology, the demand for computing resources decreases by 80% and storage resources decreases by 90%, reaching a TCO efficiency of nearly 50%.
Open source community influence builds a high-value commercialization path
As one of the leading open source software companies in China, Taos Data has long formed a complete CI/CD process based on GitHub, and can connect with third-party tools such as Telegraf, Prometheus, Grafana, Matlab, R, etc. The open source model greatly reduces the threshold of customer learning and deployment. Quantifiable performance and TCO optimization performance also greatly shorten the customer’s decision path.
In terms of commercialization, tao, data from the “open source” to “business” purchase low-cost transformation path has formed a closed loop, TaoJianHui, said many clients are actively seek through the open source community, and can independently complete the installation plan, by 2020, tao data have been accumulated energy to electricity, high-end manufacturing, wisdom, city services for clients, and other fields, The rate of increase of contract amount is as high as 329%, and the rate of increase of customer unit price is 179%.
Tdengine is available in three versions, including the open source community version: for brand building, developer community outreach, and ecosystem building; Enterprise version: support independent deployment and sell according to TBL (Term Based License) annual subscription model, and charge according to data volume (number of measuring points, data volume collected), etc. Cloud service version: PaaS service is directly provided on cloud platforms such as AliCloud and AWS, and the charge is based on data volume and time.
A team with top technical capabilities, rich entrepreneurial experience and global vision
Founder Tao Jianhui studied and worked in the United States for more than 10 years, and successfully founded two enterprises, “Hexin” and “Happy Mommy”. Based on his continuous entrepreneurial experience in the technology field, Tao Jianhui has a deep understanding of the scenarios and pain points of the Internet of Things and intelligent hardware, as well as rich technical experience in the processing of time-series data.
In addition, the research and development team of Taos Data all graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, University of Michigan, University of Maryland and other well-known universities or institutions, with master’s or doctoral degrees, and have many years of research and development experience in distributed computing, data storage and database. The team background has both technical and academic genes and industry management experience, which provides a solid guarantee for the strategic pattern and business strength of Taosi Data.
Viewpoint of Investment Institution
Zuo Lingye, partner of Jingwei China, the leading investor in this round, said that the Internet of Things is comprehensively upgrading the real world. With the application of the Internet of Things in all walks of life, the number of Internet of Things access devices and the amount of data will continue to grow rapidly, and the way of using data has also changed a lot. Taosi Data’s big data products with time-series database as the core have been verified by the top customers in many industries such as energy and power, logistics, high-end manufacturing, Internet, smart city, etc., and the open source community is highly active, and the products continue to iterate rapidly. CEO Tao Zong has been a serial entrepreneur, always has a great passion for technology and products, the team has a global vision and champion mentality, has been committed to creating the world’s top products. We believe that in the future, the products of Taos Data will become one of the most core infrastructures in the Internet of Things era.
Wu Ming, investment partner of Sequoia Capital China Fund, believes that with the rapid penetration of IoT applications in many fields such as consumption, energy, industry and smart city, the number of access devices and data volume of IoT is growing at a high speed. Targeting at the growing big data market of the Internet of Things, Taos has formed a strong competitiveness in the Internet of Things market with precise product positioning. Its core product, TDEngine, continues to iterate rapidly with a lot of positive feedback from the open source community through an open source approach. The influence of open source has also led to a rapid increase in the number of paying users. We believe that after the B round of financing, Taos Data will continue to expand its advantages in the Internet of Things big data field and build Tdengine into the world’s leading IoT data processing platform.
China has the world’s leading technology accumulation and number of device links in the Internet of Things, and it is growing rapidly, said Fo Jixun, managing partner at GGV Capital. As a time-series database specifically applied to Internet of Things scenarios, Taos data can greatly improve the efficiency of storage, query, analysis and computation, making Internet of Things application development more convenient. We are optimistic that Taos Data will continue to expand its influence in the open source community and empower more developers. GGV will also continue to support the development of the company and become a Chinese basic software company with global influence.
Wei Wei, executive director of Index Capital, believes that the rapid outbreak of data scale and strong demand for data mining and analysis along with the development of the Internet of Things are driving the innovation of the next generation of low-level data technology. At the same time, open source software has become one of the important development paths of basic software overseas. In recent years, with the accumulation of talents and technical reserves, Chinese local open source software companies have also shown an increasingly strong influence in the global scope. Under the leadership of Mr. Tao, Taos Data has been widely recognized by the global open source community and commercial customers with its forward-looking technological innovation, and has become the best solution in the field of big data in the Internet of Things. Its core product, TDEngine, has also shown its exuberant vitality and high development speed in the open source community with its keen technical insight and excellent community operation ability. Index Capital is firmly optimistic about the development potential of Taos Data, and believes that the company will continue to consolidate the global technical influence and business momentum in the future, and become the core support of enterprise data processing in the era of Internet of Everything. It is hoped that with the help of top investors, the company can amplify its existing advantages and continue to lead the global big data technology ecological innovation of the Internet of Things.
