Participated · Series C · Nov 2021

Alluxio builds open-source data orchestration software that moves data closer to analytics and machine-learning compute frameworks across clusters, regions, and clouds to provide memory-speed access to files and objects. Its platform offers intelligent data tiering and data management to deliver consistently high performance to customers in financial services, high tech, retail, and telecommunications. The software is in production use at eight out of the top ten internet companies. With this financing the company plans to expand product capabilities and scale go-to-market and engineering operations globally. Alluxio announced an expanded Asia‑Pacific presence with a new office in Beijing. The company is based in San Mateo, California, and was founded at UC Berkeley’s AMPLab by the creators of the Tachyon open-source project. Alluxio develops open-source data orchestration software for the cloud that moves data closer to big data and machine learning compute frameworks across clusters, regions, clouds and countries. The system provides memory-speed data access to files and objects and uses intelligent data tiering and data management to deliver high performance. Customers span financial services, high tech, retail and telecommunications. In the past six months the company added tens of new production deployments, including Alibaba, EA, Nielsen, Roblox, Ryte, Tencent, VIPShop, Walmart, WalkMe and WeRide. Led by founder and CEO Haoyuan (H.Y.) Li, Alluxio raised $15.5M in a Series B and has now raised $23M in total to date. The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and broaden its business reach. Alluxio provides a virtual data layer that connects data analytics and machine learning frameworks to data running on premises, in public clouds, or in multi/hybrid cloud environments. Its core product offers intelligent data tiering and data management to deliver consistent high performance. The system is designed to act as a single-source virtual data layer operating at memory speed to support analytics and ML workloads. Alluxio's technology is in production at large organizations including Alibaba, Baidu, Barclays, Comcast, Development Bank of Singapore, ESRI, JD.com, Lenovo, Oracle, PayPal, Tencent and Wells Fargo. The company is led by founder and CEO Haoyuan Li and targets customers in financial services, high tech, retail and telecommunications. Financially, Alluxio closed an $8.5M Series B and has raised $16M in total to date. Alluxio (formerly Tachyon) provides a memory-centric distributed storage platform that gives compute frameworks like Spark and MapReduce a unified namespace across disparate storage systems. The software uses a tiered storage architecture that caches hot data in memory, with SSDs and HDDs for colder data, effectively acting as a sophisticated cache for big data workloads. The project originated in UC Berkeley’s AMPlab and was founded by Haoyuan Li. Alluxio is launching both Enterprise and Community editions out of beta; the Enterprise edition adds high-availability support, enterprise security, and data replication, while the Community edition is free, certified, and includes drivers for many file systems but lacks replication and Kerberos authentication. The company monetizes through support and advanced enterprise features and counts users such as Alibaba, Baidu, Barclays Bank, CERN, Huawei, and Intel. The article highlights a customer outcome where Alluxio helped Baidu reduce ad-hoc query times on multiple petabytes of distributed data from 15 minutes to 30 seconds.

Led · Equity · Oct 2021

DeepMirror (宸境科技) develops the MirrorVerse platform and city-scale “mirror world” applications that fuse physical and virtual environments to expand user–space interaction and improve human–machine perception. The company has launched the country’s first city-level MirrorVerse in Guangzhou Nansha and introduced two new application scenarios for its platform. DeepMirror is working with China Mobile, China Southern Power Grid, GAC Group and SK China to build a Mirror City in Nansha and to accelerate 5G and spatial-intelligence deployment in urban scenarios, with use cases for smart cars and smartphones. It has a strategic cooperation agreement with Nansha JinKong Group to push big data, cloud, IoT and AI adoption across the district. The company is headquartered in Guangzhou. Financially, DeepMirror previously received a $3.5M investment from Volcanics Venture (post-money near $60M) and subsequently secured a new investor syndicate that values the company at over $100M post-money.

Participated · Series C · May 2021

Zenlayer provides on-demand edge cloud services and networking with over 220 points of presence (PoPs) globally, focused on fast-growing emerging markets such as China, India, the Middle East, South America, and Southeast Asia. The company offers ultra-low-latency compute and networking services and recently launched a PaaS product, Zenlayer Global Accelerator (ZGA), to move up the stack. It has expanded its global infrastructure and workforce by 25% in the past six months and operates 16 interconnected PoPs in Indonesia plus about 150 PoPs across APAC. Zenlayer has a dedicated sales and support team headquartered in Singapore to deepen its presence in Southeast Asia. Businesses utilize the platform to instantly improve real-time digital experiences. Financially, the company closed a supplemental C+ financing that brings its Series C round to $62 million. Zenlayer provides on-demand edge cloud and PaaS solutions that let organizations deploy compute closer to end users without building infrastructure. The company operates 180+ PoPs across 37 countries and says it can reach over 85% of the world’s internet population within 25 milliseconds. Its network includes 1,000+ peers, 230+ private lines and 20+ Tbps of backbone, and it has filed or been granted 32 patents related to SDN routing, orchestration, and edge traffic management. Zenlayer highlights customer wins including accelerating top global mobile games and social apps, and was recognized by the Pacific Telecommunications Council for networking innovation in 2019. Management plans to use new capital to enhance its edge cloud technology, expand global network coverage, and accelerate adoption of its PaaS solutions with a focus on emerging markets such as Southeast Asia and South America. The company reported over 40% revenue CAGR from 2017–2020 and has raised $90 million in total financing since inception. Zenlayer is an edge cloud services provider that offers on-demand bare metal cloud, cloud networking, SD‑WAN, and managed services. It operates in more than 120 data centers across six continents and has offices in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen. The company is led by CEO and founder Joe Zhu and is based in Los Angeles and Shanghai. Zenlayer intends to use new funding to expand globally, with an emphasis on emerging markets such as India, Indonesia, and Brazil. It will also increase research and development in its bare metal cloud, cloud networking, and SD‑WAN products. The company recently raised capital in a Series B to support these initiatives. Zenlayer provides a global connection platform of bare metal cloud, SD-WAN and edge computing services, enabling clients to deploy and manage IT resources worldwide within minutes. Led by CEO and founder Joe Zhu, the company operates a network of 60+ global data centers. It is based in Shanghai and Los Angeles and also maintains offices in Beijing, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Singapore. Zenlayer recently closed a $10M Series A financing to accelerate development of its software-defined global connection platform. The company plans to use the capital to expand its data-center footprint and further develop its platform offerings.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2020

RootPath is focused on developing personalized TCR and CAR-T therapies targeting solid tumors. The company’s core product effort centers on individualized T-cell receptor and CAR-T treatments designed for patients with solid cancers. According to the article, RootPath announced an $11 million raise to support development of these personalized treatments. The report does not include operating metrics such as revenue or user numbers. Other corporate details (founding year, location, pipeline specifics) are not provided in the article. RootPath develops a personalized T cell therapy platform aimed at bridging precision medicine and cancer immunotherapy. The company is building next-generation technologies to precisely monitor, modulate and steer the immune system for cancer diagnosis and treatment. Founded in 2017 by Drs. Xi Chen, Le Cong, Yinqing Li and Ely Porter, RootPath was launched by Nest.Bio Ventures and incubated in Nest.Bio Labs in both Cambridge and Hangzhou. The company plans to use its seed proceeds to advance its immuno-oncology programs. RootPath intends to obtain key preclinical data on accuracy, efficacy and safety in animal models. Its current financial update is the $7M seed financing led by Sequoia China.

Participated · Series B · Nov 2018

Geek+ produces a variety of warehouse robotics systems, centered on a Kiva-style wheeled robot that carts inventory shelves. The company emphasizes three technology pillars—robotics, systems, and algorithms—and offers a full product line. Geek+ cites global expansion as a primary motivator and has announced deployments in North and South America as well as partner deals in Europe. The firm reported $150 million in revenue last year and had $300 million in orders. Geek+ is led by founder and CEO Yong Zheng, who highlights first-mover advantages and improvements in R&D efficiency and cost. The company continues to expand amid strong investor interest in warehouse automation. Geek+ develops autonomous mobile robots and end-to-end robotics solutions for warehouse fulfillment and logistics, often compared to Amazon’s Kiva system. The company sells robots and is ramping a robot-as-a-service monetization model to drive recurring revenue. Geek+ has deployed more than 10,000 robots worldwide, serving about 300 customers across over 20 countries. It is pursuing international expansion, including a Conveyco partnership to distribute robots in North America and leadership hires for Americas operations. Financially, Geek+ closed a Series C of over $200 million and has raised nearly $390 million in total capital to date. The company said it will continue developing tailored robotics solutions and expanding partnerships and deployments. Geek+ is a Beijing-based robotics startup that builds unmanned robots for warehouses and logistics operations. Its product suite includes cargo-to-man picking systems, sorting and movement systems, and unmanned forklifts. The company says it has delivered more than 5,000 robots across roughly 100 warehouse projects in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Europe, and the United States, with customers such as Alibaba’s Tmall and VIP.com. Geek+ projects to grow its business by more than five-fold this year and plans to invest the new funding in product development, sales, and customer service. The startup has raised around $217 million since being founded in 2015 and claims this latest round is the largest-ever funding round for a logistics robotics startup. Management says it will focus on integrating AI, big data and robotics to optimize supply chains and expand internationally. Geek+ develops one-stop intelligent logistics robot solutions powered by AI and robotics, covering storage, order picking, material handling and parcel sorting. Its systems perform functions such as order division and consolidation, intelligent inventory replenishment, returns handling, SKU correlation analysis, route optimization, collision and congestion control, and dynamic shelf optimization. Customers include e-commerce platforms, third-party logistics providers, express delivery companies, offline retailers and manufacturers across apparel, pharmaceuticals, automotive and electronics. The company has established strategic partnerships to co-develop customized AI and robotic solutions and has delivered nearly 1,000 robot units to over 20 customers, including Tmall, VIPShop and Suning. Geek+ plans to use its new financing to upgrade its logistics robotics products, expand product offerings to more applications, accelerate geographical expansion and industry coverage, and begin exploring overseas markets through multiple channels. The company was founded in early 2015 and is based in Beijing.