Yearly Archives: 2020

News: Unpacking the C3.ai IPO filing

  • November 16, 2020
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The last thing I recall thinking about C3.ai (C3) was seeing its billboards outside San Francisco and asking myself what the hell the company actually did and how much it was spending on a huge outdoor advertisements. So much for what I know. The company filed to go public on Friday, and instead of being

The last thing I recall thinking about C3.ai (C3) was seeing its billboards outside San Francisco and asking myself what the hell the company actually did and how much it was spending on a huge outdoor advertisements.

So much for what I know. The company filed to go public on Friday, and instead of being a cash-burning, buzzwordy mess, C3 is actually in pretty good financial shape, generating both growing recurring software revenues and cash in some quarters.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

C3’s growth is not as regular as some investors might like, but the company has an attractive gross margin profile and even the occasional bit of net income to point to. Its financial picture is therefore generally likable, with a few caveats that we’ll explore.

But what does C3 do, who backed it, and what can we learn from drilling into its numbers? I am glad you asked, because those were precisely the questions that I had going into its filing.

Pull up the document here, and let’s get into the numbers.

Inside the guts of a modern AI company

First, what is C3? The former startup calls itself an enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) company, selling software services that help big companies build AI apps “of extraordinary scale and complexity that offer significant social and economic benefit,” according to its S-1.

The company sells its software in two forms: as a developer environment that lets customers design, build and deploy their AI apps on their cloud of choice, and as a group of pre-built apps users can spin up quickly. If C3 were a startup, I’d ask at this point how efficacious its AI tooling really is, but as this unicorn is worth $3.3 billion and has nine-figure revenue, it must have come up with something that works.

A host of venture capital firms have invested in C3, with the company raising more than $360 million during its lifetime, according to PitchBook data. BlackRock led its Series H, FS Investors led its Series G, its $100 million Series F was led by TPG, Breyer Capital led its Series E, TPG Growth led its Series D, while its Series C and before are a little harder to parse, but it appears that Makena Capital Management and Interwest Partners were active at that stage.

Looking to ownership, founder and entrepreneur Thomas Siebel owns just under 34%, TPG owns 22.6%, and Baker Hughes owns around 15%. The company’s voting power rests in its Class B stock, which Siebel effectively controls.

Right now, is the business itself any damn good?

The numbers

C3 has an annoying fiscal year, a twelve-month period that ends on April 30th. So, when we discuss its most recent two fiscal years, we’re chatting about the four-quarter periods that ended onm April 30, 2019 and April 30, 2020. Afterwards, we’ll drill into the July 31 quarter, the most recent period for which we have data.

News: Spotify adds a built-in podcast playlist creation tool, ‘Your Episodes’

  • November 16, 2020
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Spotify today launched a new feature designed to give podcast listeners a new way to organize and save content they want to listen to at a later time or keep their favorite episodes bookmarked for easy access. The feature, called “Your Episodes,” lets you bookmark individual episodes from any podcast, which are then added a

Spotify today launched a new feature designed to give podcast listeners a new way to organize and save content they want to listen to at a later time or keep their favorite episodes bookmarked for easy access. The feature, called “Your Episodes,” lets you bookmark individual episodes from any podcast, which are then added a new “Your Episodes” playlist.

This playlist is found pinned to the top of Your Library in the Music Playlist and Podcast Episodes tabs, says Spotify.

The new option could be useful for those times when a podcast you don’t normally subscribe to has a show you want to listen to — like an interview with a favorite celebrity, for example, or a discussion about a topic you’re passionate about. It could also be used to sample a podcast you’re unsure of by adding a couple episodes to a playlist to see how well you enjoy its content.

For example, if Spotify recommended a particular podcast based on your current listening habits, you could visit the show’s page and create a custom playlist of the episodes that looked most interesting.

In addition, users could take advantage of this new bookmarking feature to save favorite episodes they may want to listen to again at some point.

To save an episode, you’ll just click the “+” plus icon on an episode card or an episode page to add the show to the playlist. The playlist can include up to 10,000 episodes, Spotify says, and they’ll remain there until they’re manually removed.

Spotify has dabbled with podcast playlists before today. Last year, it began allowing users to add podcasts to their playlists and launched a combo music-and-podcast playlist for commuters called “Your Daily Drive.” Earlier this year, Spotify also rolled out a set of editorially curated podcast playlists to encourage discovery.

The new save feature simplifies the process of making a podcast playlist, however, as it allows users to quickly add content to a built-in playlist with a tap, instead of having to go through the more involved process of custom playlist creation.

The company says the new feature is rolling out starting today on iOS and Android to both Free users and Premium subscribers in all markets where podcasts are available.

News: Undock raises $1.6M to help solve your group scheduling nightmares

  • November 16, 2020
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Over the past decade, many startups have tried (and many have failed) to rethink the way we schedule our meetings and calls. But we seem to be in a calendrical renaissance, with incumbents like Google and Outlook getting smarter and smarter and newcomers like Calendly growing significantly. Undock, an Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator-backed startup, is looking

Over the past decade, many startups have tried (and many have failed) to rethink the way we schedule our meetings and calls. But we seem to be in a calendrical renaissance, with incumbents like Google and Outlook getting smarter and smarter and newcomers like Calendly growing significantly.

Undock, an Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator-backed startup, is looking to enter the space.

The startup recently closed a $1.6 million seed round with investors that include Lightship Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Alumni Ventures Group, Active Capital, Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital, Sarah Impach of Paypal/LinkedIn, and several other angel investors.

For now, Undock is a Chrome extension that allows users to seamlessly see mutual availability across a group, whether or not all users in the group have Undock, all from within their email. Founder and CEO Nash Ahmed wouldn’t go into too much detail about the technology that allows Undock to accomplish this. But, on the surface, users who don’t yet have Undock can temporarily link their calendar to the individual meeting request to automatically find times that work for everyone in the group. Otherwise, they can see the suggested times of the rest of the group and mark the ones that work for them.

This is just the beginning of the journey for Undock. The company plans to launch a full-featured calendar in Q1 of 2021, that would include collaborative editing right within calendar events, and embedded video conferencing.

According to Ahmed, the most important differentiating features of Undock are that it focuses on mutual availability (not just singular availability) and that it does so right within the email client.

Image Credits: undock

Scheduling will always be free within Undock, but the full calendar (when it’s released publicly) will have a variety of tiers starting at $10/month per user. Undock will also borrow from the Slack model and charge more for retention of information.

“The greatest challenge is definitely customer education,” said Ahmed, explaining that early on some users were confused by the product’s simplicity. “We messaged it by saying it’s like autocomplete. And early users would get into their email and then ask what to do next, or if they had to go back to Undock or to the Chrome extension. And we’d have to say ‘no, just keep typing.’”

The Undock team, which is Black- and female-founded, numbers 18 people. Twenty-eight percent of the team is female, 22 percent are Black, and 11 percent are LGBTQ, and the diversity of the leadership team is even higher.

News: Computer vision startup Chooch.ai scores $20M Series A

  • November 16, 2020
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Chooch.ai, a startup that hopes to bring computer vision more broadly to companies to help them identify and tag elements at high speed, announced a $20 million Series A today. Vickers Venture Partners led the round with participation from 212, Streamlined Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, Waterman Ventures and several other unnamed investors. Today’s investment brings

Chooch.ai, a startup that hopes to bring computer vision more broadly to companies to help them identify and tag elements at high speed, announced a $20 million Series A today.

Vickers Venture Partners led the round with participation from 212, Streamlined Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, Waterman Ventures and several other unnamed investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $25.8 million, according to the company.

“Basically we set out to copy human visual intelligence in machines. That’s really what this whole journey is about,” CEO and co-founder Emrah Gultekin explained. As the company describes it, “Chooch Al can rapidly ingest and process visual data from any spectrum, generating AI models in hours that can detect objects, actions, processes, coordinates, states, and more.”

Chooch is trying to differentiate itself from other AI startups by taking a broader approach that could work in any setting, rather than concentrating on specific vertical applications. Using the pandemic as an example, Gultekin says you could use his company’s software to identify everyone who is not wearing a mask in the building or everyone who is not wearing a hard hat at construction site.

 

With 22 employees spread across the U.S., India and Turkey, Chooch is building a diverse company just by virtue of its geography, but as it doubles the workforce in the coming year, it wants to continue to build on that.

“We’re immigrants. We’ve been through a lot of different things, and we recognize some of the issues and are very sensitive to them. One of our senior members is a person of color and we
are very cognizant of the fact that we need to develop that part of our company,” he said. At a recent company meeting, he said that they were discussing how to build diversity into the policies and values of the company as they move forward.

The company currently has 18 enterprise clients and hopes to use the money to add engineers, data scientists and begin to build out a worldwide sales team to continue to build the product and expand its go-to-market effort.

Gultekin says that the company’s unusual name comes from a mix of the words choose and search. He says that it is also an old Italian insult. “It means dummy or idiot, which is what artificial intelligence is today. It’s a poor reflection of humanity or human intelligence in humans,” he said. His startup aims to change that.

News: A report card for the SEC’s new equity crowdfunding rules

  • November 16, 2020
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I am excited that these actions further speed money velocity and allow more people on both the entrepreneurial and investment side of the ecosystem to participate.

Slava Rubin
Contributor

Slava Rubin is founder at Vincent, founder at Indiegogo and founder and general partner at humbition.

This month, the Securities Exchange Commission approved major updates to rules enacted via the 2012 JOBS Act. Their stated goal was to “harmonize” the guidelines that establish exemptions for equity crowdfunding, Reg D and Reg A+ offerings. These changes are a powerful step forward for both startups and investors alike.

This is a space I’ve watched closely since we launched Indiegogo in 2008 and Vincent earlier this year. I spent four years working with the Obama administration, the SEC and FINRA to help pass the JOBS Act in 2012. After that, it took another four years of rule refining with the SEC and FINRA before finally seeing equity crowdfunding go live in May 2016. At Indiegogo, we worked with several great partners, helping fund nearly 150 businesses via equity crowdfunding in just a couple of years.

For those who worked behind the scenes, we knew that the initial 2016 rules for equity crowdfunding were baby steps. We were balancing unknown risks with legacy rules, aiming toward broader democratization for both investors and entrepreneurs. Now, crowdfunding’s day has come, and I commend all involved including the regulators, politicians, startups and investors who all worked together to push the ecosystem forward to the next step.

That said, even today equity crowdfunding isn’t perfect. There are limits to how much you can raise, how you can communicate and how much documentation you need to provide. In reality, it’s not much different than raising from a pre-seed or seed investor, or far removed from a traditional product crowdfund. In short, it works.

The SEC made some important changes to the rules, and it’s valuable to explore them one by one. Rather than look at them on a macro scale, here are some of the bullet points that are important to entrepreneurs.

  • Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) is the basic equity crowdfunding raise for companies. Now, companies can raise up to $5 million from investors, up from the current $1.07 million cap. Any investor can participate.
  • Regulation D, Rule 504 (Reg D) is another type of equity crowdfunding, but exclusively for accredited investors. With the new rules, its maximum funding cap raises to $10 million from $5 million.
  • Regulation A+, Tier II (Reg A+), which is for more established companies, can now raise $75 million via equity crowdfunding, up from the current $50 million. This is a huge move, enabling established companies to gain millions of dry powder. Any investor can participate.
  • Thanks to a “test the waters” provision, companies can build Indiegogo-like crowdfunding pages that allow companies to share information with investors prior to fundraising. This is new for Reg CF, but was previously allowed for Reg A+.
  • Demo day communications, in general, will no longer be considered general solicitation.
  • Reg CF and A+ offerings can use special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to consolidate their investor base into a single line item on a cap table.
  • Reg CF fundraisers can be done every 30 days, down from every 180 days.

Now for a report card. In hopes of clarifying these changes a bit, I looked at each specific point and gave it a letter grade depending on how important it will be to up-and-coming entrepreneurs. While many of the rules got an A or better, some are still lagging and, as we move into a new administration and new year, the difference between crowdfunding success and failure could be spelled out in these simple changes.

1. Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF) limit increase

Grade Previous rules (2016) Updated rules (2020)
A Maximum allowed fundraise of $1.07 million Increase in maximum fundraise to $5 million

This change is significant. One of the main complaints we heard from entrepreneurs exploring Reg CF were the actual costs associated with the raise. Between financial, legal and platform fees, companies could be looking at setup costs of $100,000 or more. Combined with time, effort and additional marketing expenses, it adds up to a lot of money just to be capped at $1 million. When compared to finding a few angel investors, the costs often don’t justify the effort. But at a $5 million cap, the cost-of-capital economics drastically improve. Also $5 million is real money, not something a few angels can match.

2. Regulation A+ Tier II limit increase

Grade Previous rules (2016) Updated rules (2020)
C Maximum allowed fundraise of $50 million Increase in maximum fundraise to $75 million

In this case, it’s nice that the cap has gone up, but this isn’t a game-changer. Rarely do Reg A+ offerings even hit the $50 million cap, and those considering Reg+ rarely cite the cap as a key deciding factor. It’s always nice to see the number go up, but this doesn’t change much.

News: ‘Resident Evil’ game maker Capcom confirms data breach after ransomware attack

  • November 16, 2020
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Capcom, the Japanese game maker behind the Resident Evil and Street Fighter franchises, has confirmed that hackers stole customer data and files from its internal network following a ransomware attack earlier in the month. That’s an about-turn from the days immediately following the cyberattack, in which Capcom said it had no evidence that customer data

Capcom, the Japanese game maker behind the Resident Evil and Street Fighter franchises, has confirmed that hackers stole customer data and files from its internal network following a ransomware attack earlier in the month.

That’s an about-turn from the days immediately following the cyberattack, in which Capcom said it had no evidence that customer data had been accessed.

In a statement, the company said data on as many as 350,000 customers may have been stolen, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases dates of birth. Capcom said the hackers also stole its own internal financial data and human resources files on current and former employees, which included names, addresses, dates of birth, and photos. The attackers also took “confidential corporate information,” the company said, including documents on business partners, sales, and development.

Capcom said that no credit card information was taken, as payments are handled by a third-party company.

But the company warned that the overall amount of data stolen “cannot specifically be ascertained” due to losing its own internal logs in the cyberattack.

Capcom apologized for the breach. “Capcom offers its sincerest apologies for any complications and concerns that this may bring to its potentially impacted customers as well as to its many stakeholders,” the statement read.

The video games maker was hit by the Ragnar Locker ransomware on November 2, prompting the company to shut down its network. Ragnar Locker is a data-stealing ransomware, which exfiltrates data from a victim before encrypting its network, and then threatens to publish the stolen files unless a ransom is paid. In doing so, ransomware groups can still demand a company pays the ransom even if the victim restores their files and systems from backups.

Ragnar Locker’s website now lists data allegedly stolen from Capcom, with a message implying that the company did not pay the ransom.

Capcom said it had informed data protection regulators in Japan and the United Kingdom, as required under European GDPR data breach notification rules. Companies can be fined up to 4% of their annual revenue for falling foul of GDPR rules.

News: Equity Monday: C3.AI files to go public and Vision Fund 2 leads $100M round

  • November 16, 2020
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode that we wound up titling “Th O’s r ptinal, th dllrs r mndtry,“ a joke that if we observe the weekend’s podcast analytics, was a mistake.

Lesson learned!

But in better news there was lots to get to this morning, so here’s a digest of what we talked about:

Do not sleep on the fact that our own Chris Gates is posting Equity videos from every main episode over on YouTube. He does a great job and it’s fun to be on video, as well as audio platforms.

We hope you are rested and ready to go for the rest of the week. Chat as soon as Airbnb files.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

News: HBO Max arrives on Amazon Fire TV devices

  • November 16, 2020
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WarnerMedia’s streaming service HBO Max is finally coming to Amazon’s Fire TV, nearly half a year after it first launched. The service, which combines HBO content with an expanded selection from WarnerMedia’s library and a slate of originals, debuted without support for two of the largest streaming platforms in the U.S.: Amazon Fire TV and

WarnerMedia’s streaming service HBO Max is finally coming to Amazon’s Fire TV, nearly half a year after it first launched. The service, which combines HBO content with an expanded selection from WarnerMedia’s library and a slate of originals, debuted without support for two of the largest streaming platforms in the U.S.: Amazon Fire TV and Roku.

As a part of the new deal, existing HBO subscribers on Amazon will be able to use the HBO Max app at no additional cost.

The delay to get the HBO Max app on Amazon Fire TV wasn’t technical in nature, but rather a result of failed negotiations between the companies. Amazon wanted to be able to sell access to HBO Max through its existing Prime Video Channels platform, as it did for HBO. This was complicated by the fact that HBO didn’t exactly release HBO Max as a brand-new service, but was updating its HBO Now app to become HBO Max. That seemingly left the door open for a similar upgrade to other existing HBO subscribers, Amazon believed.

WarnerMedia, on the other hand, wanted to distribute HBO Max as a new streaming service, not as a premium channel add-on, like HBO. When asked about its failure to offer apps for Roku and Amazon Fire TV, the company explained in May it was looking forward to “reaching agreements with the few outstanding distribution partners left, including with Amazon and on par with how they provide customers access to Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu on Fire devices.”

At last, that deal got done. The companies announced this morning HBO Max would begin to roll out to Amazon Fire TV streaming devices, Fire TV Edition smart TVs, and Fire tablets on Tuesday, November 17. This will expand HBO Max’s potential reach to “tens of millions” of Amazon device customers, WarnerMedia said.

The company tells TechCrunch that, as a result of the deal, HBO content will continue to be available on Prime Video Channels with a subscription. Meanwhile, customers who have a subscription to HBO through Prime Video Channels now also have access to HBO Max for no additional cost.

To access HBO Max, customers can log into the HBO Max app using their Amazon credentials, a spokesperson said. This is similar to how HBO customers can access the HBO Max app with other vMVPD (Virtual Multichannel Video Programming Distributor — a streaming service with live and on-demand content) credentials, like YouTube TV or Hulu.

“We are very excited that Amazon customers will now be able to enjoy the best-in-class content that lives within HBO Max,” said Tony Goncalves, Head of Sales and Distribution for WarnerMedia, in a statement about the deal. “Our continued goal is to make HBO Max and its unparalleled content available to customers across all the devices they love. Fire TV is a favorite among customers and we look forward to working with the Amazon team to engage and grow our existing subscriber base by showcasing all that HBO Max has to offer.”

The Fire TV integrations will also allow Amazon customers to launch and navigate HBO Max by voice, using Alexa commands like “Alexa, find HBO Max,” or “Alexa, find Game of Thrones,” and more.

“We’ve worked closely with HBO for many years to bring their great content to Fire TV and to make it easier to discover and enjoy with features like search integration, Alexa and personalized recommendations,: said Marc Whitten, Vice President of Amazon Entertainment Devices and Services, in a statement. “We are excited to continue that partnership with the launch of HBO Max to bring even more incredible content to customers on Fire TV.”

Last month, WarnerMedia reported that HBO Max had grown to reach 28.7 million total subscribers, but few of these customers were “over the top” — meaning, coming in through standalone subscriptions to the HBO Max app, like what will be available on Amazon Fire TV. Instead, most customers were coming in from  “wholesale” agreements — that is, a pay TV provider of some kind. Only 3.6 million were considered direct retail subscribers.

Those numbers may increase now that HBO Max is addressing at least one of the two key streaming device markets for distribution. Roku, however, has not yet announced a similar deal.

News: NASA sends Baby Yoda to space aboard SpaceX Dragon alongside astronauts

  • November 16, 2020
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NASA added a surprise fifth passenger to the Crew-1 mission currently en route to the International Space Station – a plush The Child (aka Baby Yoda) from The Mandalorian. The doll is what’s known as the “zero-gravity indicator” – typically a soft, small object that is allowed to float free in the spacecraft cabin to

NASA added a surprise fifth passenger to the Crew-1 mission currently en route to the International Space Station – a plush The Child (aka Baby Yoda) from The Mandalorian. The doll is what’s known as the “zero-gravity indicator” – typically a soft, small object that is allowed to float free in the spacecraft cabin to provide a simple, but effective confirmation of when it passes into the phase of a spaceflight where Earth’s gravity no longer holds significant sway.

Crew-1’s other four passengers are all actual people – NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi. They’re on their way to the ISS to staff it for the next half a year, on NASA’s first operational commercial crew mission, courtesy of partner SpaceX, which certified its Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft for human flight earlier this year.

Baby Yoda won hearts with its debut on Disney’s original streaming show The Mandalorian last year, and continues to woo audiences with this year’s second season. It earned its colloquial nickname because it’s a juvenile version of whatever the heck the original Yoda from the Star Wars saga is. In the new series, the youngster regularly earns reprimands from the series’ titular bounty hunter for messing around with his spacecraft controls.

The Child merch is already white hot, but zero-G indicators of past have also notably become hot ticket items following their trips to space. On SpaceX’s first human spaceflight mission, the Demo-2 test flight that took place earlier this year, a Ty Flippable dinosaur called ‘Tremor’ quickly flew off shelves following its own free-floating antics.

News: Zilliz raises $43 million as investors rush to China’s open source software

  • November 16, 2020
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For years, founders and investors in China had little interest in open source software because it did not seem like the most viable business model. Zilliz‘s latest financing round shows that attitude is changing. The three-year-old Chinese startup, which builds open source software for processing unstructured data, recently closed a Series B round of $43

For years, founders and investors in China had little interest in open source software because it did not seem like the most viable business model. Zilliz‘s latest financing round shows that attitude is changing. The three-year-old Chinese startup, which builds open source software for processing unstructured data, recently closed a Series B round of $43 million.

The investment, which catapults Zilliz’s to-date raise to over $53 million, is a sizable amount for any open source business around the world. Storied private equity firm Hillhouse Capital led the round joined by Trustbridge Partners, Pavilion Capital, and existing investors 5Y Capital (formerly Morningside) and Yunqi Partners.

Investors are going after Zilliz as they increasingly recognize open source as an effective software development strategy, Charles Xie, founder and CEO of Zilliz, told TechCrunch at an open source meetup in Shenzhen where he spoke as the first Chinese board chairperson for Linux Foundation’s AI umbrella, LF AI.

“Investors are seeing very good exits for open source companies around the world in recent years, from Elastic to MongoDB,” he added.

“When Starlord [Xie’s nickname] first told us his vision for data processing in the future digital age, we thought it was a crazy idea, but we chose to believe,” said 5Y Capital’s partner Liu Kai.

There’s one caveat for investing in the area: don’t expect to make money in the first 3 to 5 years. “But if you’re looking at an 8 to 10-year cycle, these [open source] companies can gain valuation at tens of billions of dollars,” Xie reckoned.

After six years as a software engineer at Oracle, Xie left the U.S. and headed home to start Zilliz in China. Like many Chinese entrepreneurs these days, Xie named his startup in English to mark the firm’s vision to be “global from day one.” While Zilliz set out in Shanghai, the goal is to relocate its headquarters to Silicon Valley when the firm delivers “robust technology and products” in the next 12 months, Xie said. China is an ideal starting point both for the cheaper engineering talents and the explosive growth of unstructured data — anything from molecular structure, people’s shopping behavior, audio information to video content.

“The amount of unstructured data in a region is in proportion to the size of its population and the level of its economic activity, so it’s easy to see why China is the biggest data source,” Xie observed.

On the other hand, China has seen rapid development in mobile internet and AI, especially in terms of real-life applications, which Xie argued makes China a suitable testing ground for data processing software.

So far Zilliz’s open source product Milvus has been “starred” over 4,440 times on GitHub and attracted some 120 contributors and 400 enterprise users around the world, half of whom are outside China. It’s done so without spending a penny on advertising; rather, user acquisition has come from its active participation on GitHub, Reddit, and other online developer communities.

Going forward, Zilliz plans to deploy its fresh capital in overseas recruitment, expanding its open source ecosystem, as well as research and development in its cloud-based products and services, which will eventually become a revenue driver as it starts monetizing in the second half of 2021.

  


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