On January 4, 2022, SphereEx, an innovative database basic software provider, announced the completion of a Pre-A round of financing of nearly 10 million US dollars. This round of financing was led by Jiayu Capital, followed by Sequoia China Seed Fund, Chuxin Capital, and Index Venture Capital. This is another financing completed by SphereEx since May 2021, and it is also the second financing completed more than half a year after the company was founded. This round of financing funds will be mainly used for SphereEx product development and commercialization verification.
SphereEx is a company dedicated to building a new type of distributed database infrastructure. It was founded by core members of Apache ShardingSphere in April 2021. In May of the same year, it received a multi-million dollar angel round investment from Sequoia China Seed Fund and Chuxin Capital. The core members of the company team are from leading Internet companies and well-known infrastructure software providers, with rich experience in basic software architecture, research and development, implementation, delivery and marketization.
As the domestic society gradually enters the digital age, as an important infrastructure of the digital economy, the importance of databases has become increasingly prominent. According to the assessment of third-party institutions, the size of China's database market will reach 68.8 billion yuan by 2025. It is conceivable that there will be more market opportunities in the entire database field. On the other hand, with the launch of the 14th Five-Year Plan, the open source ecosystem has received strategic support from the policy level, and the new collaborative approach led by open source is profoundly affecting the trajectory of enterprise application technology. As one of the important participants in the open source ecosystem, SphereEx has made it clear from the beginning of its establishment that it will unswervingly follow the path of open source. As the top project of the Apache Software Foundation, after years of precipitation and development, Apache ShardingSphere has gained more than 15K Stars attention on GitHub and has become one of the most popular open source projects in the industry. Its native open source model has a strong network communication effect, and the first-mover advantage is obvious.
SphereEx will stand on the shoulders of the giant Apache ShardingSphere and build high-quality commercial products and enterprise-level services.
Released the first practical version of Database Plus concept based on the pluggable architecture base
In order to enable enterprises to connect data and applications more simply, incrementally and quickly to support data services and diversified ecological support data service requirements, SphereEx promotes the design and implementation of the microkernel and pluggable architecture model of Apache ShardingSphere to provide community users with While lightweight and flexible componentized open source products coexist, it also provides a unified entrance for enterprise-level products with incremental functions.
With the full support of SphereEx, the Apache ShardingSphere 5.0.0 GA version was officially released on November 10, 2021, the third anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. This is the first concept and practice version of Database Plus. Database Plus is a standard layer and ecological layer that builds use and interaction on top of fragmented homogeneous or heterogeneous databases, and superimposes and expands more computing power, so that the interaction between all applications and databases is oriented to the standard built by Database Plus Layer, thereby shielding the differentiated impact of database fragmentation on upper-layer services. With the release of this version, Apache ShardingSphere officially opened a new stage with a pluggable architecture as the core, realizing the transformation and capability improvement from the single function of data slicing in the past to the current upper-level standard and ecological identity of heterogeneous databases. In the future, SphereEx will reshape the database structure under the trend of fragmentation through the continuous update of product versions, open up the gap between data and applications, meet the needs of users in diversified database usage scenarios, and bring new solutions to the database industry.
Open source community influence & deep integration of technology ecology to accelerate commercialization
SphereEx has always adhered to the concept of openness, diversity, and co-construction, actively connecting developers and users around the world, and promoting the stable and active development of the Apache ShardingSphere open source community. Since the open source in 2016, ShardingSphere has attracted a large number of developers and has accumulated rich scene practices in many enterprises. Now the ShardingSphere Chinese community is highly active, and overseas communities are also expanding rapidly. Currently, more than 50% of Apache ShardingSphere's code comes from community contributors outside of SphereEx, and all SphereEx seed customers are transformed from the community.
In addition to the investment in the open source ecosystem, SphereEx also actively cooperates with manufacturers in the industry chain that provide industry-leading innovative technologies to increase the value of common solutions. Currently, SphereEx has established in-depth cooperation with Huawei's open-source database openGauss and Yunhe Enmo's release version of MogDB to form an integrated high-performance distributed solution.
Due to the industry's leading position in terms of technological completeness, stability, and community activity, SphereEx products are currently used in the production environment of enterprises in the Internet, finance, O2O, logistics, cloud computing and other fields, and have become many companies The core components of its data computing architecture have been recognized by enterprise-level users.
Open up open source-business model defines the next generation of critical infrastructure for enterprises
SphereEx is committed to further promoting the development and evolution of Apache ShardingSphere, expanding the global user community, and providing enterprise-level customers with commercial products and services based on Apache ShardingSphere. "It is the original intention of SphereEx to provide a full-time platform for open source enthusiasts and make the community more open and prosperous. It is the responsibility of SphereEx to open a new path for the development of open source native companies through the practice of open source-business models." SphereEx was founded. Ren and CEO Zhang Liang said, “As SphereEx continues to invest, the compatibility, performance, and stability of ShardingSphere will once again be greatly improved. In addition, SphereEx will provide service models such as cloud subscription and privatized deployment.”
In terms of commercialization, SphereEx will prioritize the strategy of track layout (such as Cloud), core convergence and stability (such as horizontal expansion) and peripheral ecological expansion (such as data encryption). In the commercial product matrix planned by SphereEx, system construction based on multi-cloud capabilities is the top priority for future work. At the same time, innovative database cloud products based on the concept of Database Mesh will also accelerate research and development.
In the future, SphereEx will continue to strengthen the construction of open source communities, increase investment in technology research and development, and gradually expand overseas markets, further accelerating commercialization on a global scale.
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