Author | Xingling Wu
Exhibit | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)
2019 is undoubtedly the burning year of China's open source. Since then, the open source fire has continued to sweep through 2020. According to GitHub's statistics in 2019, open source developers from China with 40 million registered users worldwide rank second in the world in terms of number and contribution, and contribute 5.5 million projects to GitHub.
In terms of capital, basic open source software companies are welcoming good news. For example, the domestic Internet of Things operating system RT-Thread and Ruiside Technology have completed nearly 100 million yuan in Series B financing, and the operating system SylixOS team Yihui Information completed 120 million yuan A round of financing, Taosi data behind TDengine during the epidemic won 20 million US dollars in financing...
According to Jiang Tao, the founder & chairman of CSDN and founding partner of Geekbang Venture Capital, with nearly 30 years of technological innovation, open source has become the cornerstone of technology applications and the digital development of the industry, and the commercialization of open source has also been greatly improved. Breakthrough and won the favor of many VCs.
As of May 30, 2020, on the CSDN website, there are nearly 6 million articles related to GitHub TOP 1000 well-known open source projects, and 720,000 authors. In the past 6 months, it has generated 1.7 billion visits, so it seems , Developers are very concerned about open source.
Today there is another good news in the open source community. AI unstructured data processing and analysis software company Zilliz announced the completion of a US$43 million Series B financing. According to official sources, this is by far the largest single round B financing in the global open source basic software field.
Not only that, not long ago, Xingjue, the founder and CEO of Zilliz, was elected as the chairman of the board of LF AI. This is the first time that a Chinese representative has assumed the highest leadership position in the top international open source AI community. Below, Xingjue introduces the story behind this financing:
Xing Jue, Chairman of the Board of LF AI, Founder and CEO of Zilliz
Open source only one year, received 43 million US dollars in financing
Companies have had a hard time under the epidemic this year, but when some companies went bankrupt and layoffs, Zilliz completed the B round of financing. According to official sources, this is the largest single financing for open source basic software in the world. Why can Zilliz break through?
Xingjue first introduced Zilliz's unique technical advantages: 80% of the data in human society exists in the form of unstructured data, and they have not been effectively used. In the past few decades, we have been able to use computers to efficiently process structured data such as numerical values and texts, but there is a lack of widespread unstructured data such as pictures, videos, behavioral portraits, compound three-dimensional structures and gene sequences, etc. Effective treatment method.
Zilliz focuses on AI unstructured data processing and analysis technology. With the help of strong computing power and efficient AI algorithms provided by heterogeneous computing, it uses high-dimensional data and models (feature vectors, Embedding) for data processing, and provides unstructured data processing. The analysis, understanding, indexing, and search of intelligent data help all walks of life actively embrace data intelligence and improve the digital level of human society.
As a pioneer of AI unstructured data processing and analysis technology, Zilliz has been deeply involved in technology research and development in the past three years.
In October 2019, Milvus, a vector similarity search engine developed by Zilliz, was open sourced on GitHub. Currently, the number of Stars exceeds 4,400, with 120+ contributors, adopted by 400+ organizations and institutions around the world, in image processing, computer vision, and natural language processing. , Speech recognition, recommendation systems, search engines, drug discovery, genetic analysis and other fields have a wide range of applications.
In April 2020, Milvus was accepted as an incubation project by the LF AI & Data Foundation, and currently ranks first in the LF AI & Data Foundation for contribution. As a new type of open source basic software, Milvus validates developers' demand for AI unstructured data processing and analysis services, which is the key reason for attracting investors.
How will Zilliz make a profit after the project is open sourced?
Xingjue said that in the understanding of many people, open source and profitability seem to be irrelevant for software companies. But with the emergence of the cloud service model, the new business model of software has gradually become clear. The model of software as a product is no longer suitable for new basic software, and the concept of using services as a product is being accepted by more developers. Therefore, Zilliz is not only a software company, but also a basic software cloud service company.
Open source projects help developers significantly reduce the software cost of AI unstructured data processing and analysis applications. In the future, cloud services related to AI unstructured data processing and analysis will be further provided to help developers further reduce the overall cost of application construction and operation.
How to attract the attention of investors when technical people start a business?
Xingjue’s advice to technical people is to find the turning point that brings changes. This requires accumulation of the industry, insight into trends, and more clearly and patiently explaining your ideas to the outside world. This way your team and investors can understand the meaning of entrepreneurship. Secondly, we need to persist, persist in long-term R&D investment, persist in creating excellent products, be friends of time, and create long-term value.
In the third issue of "The Big Coffee Is Coming", Xingjue once reminded the developer:
First, domestic open source projects must choose the theme and direction of open source, and don't repeat the wheel. Re-creating the wheel is your lack of systematic thinking and long-term insight into the needs, thinking, and future development of the industry. Many domestic projects have homogeneous competition. If the community does not form a good synergy, it will be impossible to start when selecting projects.
The second is that developers need to determine the boundaries of open source projects. Once the boundaries of the project are determined, it can be better integrated into the open source ecosystem. Programmers should refrain from omnipotent ideas when doing projects, and set boundaries so that the project can better integrate and collaborate with the entire open source ecosystem. In addition to selecting a good project, controlling the code quality of the project, and making more agile iterations in function, the more important thing is the operation of the project.
Finally, we must use open source projects as a weapon to understand user needs. The best open source projects are close to user needs from day one. The white paper, blueprint, and source code of the project are open to the entire community for users to use and participate in community discussions. With open source, we start from the needs of users and ask them to give their opinions on the project. This is an important guarantee for an open source project to have an active community and move towards the correct technical route. It is necessary to communicate with users and the community with an open mind, so that the entire community slowly leads the development of the project.
Talking about the future, Xingjue said that after this round of financing, Zilliz will continue to be rooted at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and big data innovation, further accelerating technology research and development and open source innovation in the field of unstructured data processing and analysis, and further reducing the overall unstructured The threshold of data usage helps more enterprises to transform their data intelligently. Zilliz develops corresponding cloud products and services to provide global developers with safe, reliable, easy-to-use and low-cost unstructured data cloud services, forming a cycle from open source to commercial. Zilliz will actively recruit global talents, build a global developer ecosystem, and strive to become an open source basic software company with global influence.
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