Tencent , enter a track you may not have heard of.
This stems from an extremely low-key industrial and commercial change. The investment community learned that Shenzhen Yunbao Intelligent Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yunbao Intelligent") has undergone industrial and commercial changes recently, with new shareholders Guangxi Tencent Venture Capital Co., Ltd. . Among them, Tencent is the largest shareholder.
This is an DPU startup company. Founder Xiao Qiyang was once an associate professor at the MIT lecturer in the United States and is well-known in semiconductor . It is worth mentioning that behind this seemingly unfamous company are Sequoia China, Shenzhen Venture Capital , Wuyuan Capital, NIO Capital, Zhengxin Valley Capital, and SMIC Juyuan.
DPU, a 100 billion track comparable to GPU is rising. Starting from 2021, the scene of VC/PE competing for DPU projects is impressive. What’s even rarer is that the Internet giants gather on this battlefield - in addition to Tencent, Alibaba , ByteDance, Meituan , Baidu , and ByteDance even casts an angel wheel. This is the most lively investment track for Internet giants.
MIThings2 Professor Making Chip
Sequoia has invested, Tencent has taken action for its largest shareholder
Tencent. What kind of company is this?
official website shows that Shenzhen Yunbao Intelligent Co., Ltd. is a technology company focusing on cloud computing and data center data processor chips (DPUs) and solutions. The core team comes from Broadcom, Intel, Arm, Huawei HiSilicon, Alibaba, etc. The company's founding team has an average of more than 20 years of experience in the chip industry and large-scale commercial implementation.
Behind the company is a big technology expert - Founder and CEO Xiao Qiyang . He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from from and a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Cooper University in New York with the highest honors. Later, he obtained a doctorate and master's degree in electronic engineering from from at Stanford University. During his doctoral studies, Xiao Qiyang also overcomes theoretical problems that have not been solved in the field of artificial intelligence for more than ten years, and has won the National Science Foundation Youth Researcher Award for this.
Not only that, Xiao Qiyang is also one of the pioneers in the field of Internet of Things research. He founded the Center for Automatic Identification Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1998, as the founding research director of the center. Later, he served as an associate professor at the MIT in the United States, focusing on the research field of network and distributed computing for a long time.
After leaving the academic world, Xiao Qiyang began his entrepreneurial career. In 2002, he founded a company in Silicon Valley, USA to develop high-performance multi-core processor . The products are widely used in wireless base stations, base station controllers, core networks, routers, smart network cards and other equipment, and customers cover well-known communication network equipment manufacturers at home and abroad. In 2009, RMI was acquired by the US listed company NetLogic, and Xiao Qiyang turned to NetLogic as president and general manager of the Asia-Pacific region.
Under Xiao Qiyang's leadership, the NetLogic Asia-Pacific team defeated Freescale, the world's leading semiconductor company, in one fell swoop, and won the largest 4G base station CPU project in China at that time. An interesting detail is that at that time, the famous strong woman in the semiconductor industry was also competing with Xiao Qiyang - Su Zifeng . In 2012, Xiao Qiyang led to another acquisition case - Broadcom acquired NetLogic for a high price of US$3.7 billion in cash. After the merger was completed, he served as the general manager of the processor and wireless infrastructure division of Broadcom , and did not officially leave until 2015.
has been immersed in the semiconductor industry for more than 20 years, and Xiao Qiyang does not plan to retire. In 2020, with the explosive growth of computing power demand, the DPU track became popular instantly. So, Xiao Qiyang started his business again and founded Yunbao Intelligent.
An unknown investor in Shanghai revealed that Xiao Bo (Xiao Qiyang) and his team were very low-key and had never officially announced any financing news.However, the official website information shows that Yunbao Intelligent has gathered a super luxury investment group - Tencent, Sequoia China, NIO Capital, SMIC Juyuan, Shenzhen Venture Capital, Wuyuan Capital, Zhengxin Valley Capital, Yaotu Capital, ACE Equity Partners, Huaye Tiancheng, OBN CAPITAL and other well-known VCs/PEs.
According to Tianyancha , Tencent is the major shareholder of Yunbao Intelligent, and holds 24.32% of stake in . Two years after its establishment, the team of 5 people has rapidly expanded to more than 300 people.
This is a secret track
ByteDance, Meituan, Baidu all came
With Tencent entering the market, we saw a brand new track - DPU.
The so-called DPU, namely the Data Processing Unit, was first proposed by Silicon Valley startup Fungible. At the beginning, DPUs did not attract much attention in the industry. Until 2020, Nvidia founder Huang Renxun called DPU along with CPU and GPU the "three pillars of future computing." After that, the DPU was instantly popular.
Starting from 2021, many people in China are scrambling DPU projects. An investor in Beijing who had previously followed the entertainment track went to class for several months before he dared to talk about the project in order to understand the DPU. How crazy the investors were at that time, Xinqiyuan should have a deep understanding of the feelings.
was founded in 2015. Xinqiyuan is a domestic company that provides domestic DPU chips for super-large telecommunications and enterprise-level intelligent networks. Founder Lu Sheng graduated from Shanghai Jiaotong University and obtained a master's degree in engineering science from Lamar University in the United States. He has been deeply engaged in the field of semiconductors for more than 20 years and has extremely rich industry experience and extensive industrial resources.
In 2021 alone, Xinqiyuan completed three rounds of financing, including well-known investors such as SoftBank China , SIG Haina Asia, China Internet Investment Fund , China Resources Capital Runke Fund, Xingwang Investment and other well-known investors. A Shanghai-based FA admitted that many investment institutions were competing for Xinqiyuan's share last year, and the competition was too fierce.
At the same time, companies such as Dayu Zhixin, Zhongke Yushu, Nebula Zhilian, Yisixin and other companies also became the targets of VC/PE hunting. Among them, Dayu Zhixin and Zhongke Yushu both completed two rounds of hundreds of millions of financing in 2021.
However, an interesting phenomenon is that not only financial VC/PE, Internet giants such as Tencent, Meituan, ByteDance, and Baidu have also poured into the DPU track.
In October 2021, Yunmai Xinlian, a new DPU that was established shortly after, announced that it had completed a angel round of financing of hundreds of millions of yuan. In addition to IDG Capital and Biren Technology, ByteDance also appeared. It is reported that the founding team of Yunmaixin is composed of leading figures in the field of data center networks and senior experts in software and hardware system and chip research and development of world-renowned companies. In April this year, Yunmai Xinlian raised hundreds of millions of yuan in financing, and investors include Lightspeed China and National Integrated Circuit Industry Fund , a subsidiary of Fund , surpassing Moore Strategic Investment and Yunjiu Capital.
In addition, Meituan and Baidu also took a fancy to the same project - Nebula Intelligent. Nebula Zhilian, located in , Zhuhai , is also an enterprise focusing on the research and development of basic interconnection communication architectures and DPU chips in data centers. Since its establishment in 2021, Nebula Intelligence has gathered well-known investment institutions such as Hillhouse Venture Capital, CITIC Capital, Huadeng International, BAI Capital, Jiayu Capital, and Songhe Capital .
An impressive financing was in August 2021. Nebula Zhilian announced that it had completed a round A financing of hundreds of millions of yuan, with Meituan's exclusive investment. At that time, Zhu Wenqian, vice president of strategy and investment at Meituan, once expressed that she hoped that Meituan and the Nebula team would have more coordination and cooperation in the field of infrastructure. Coincidentally, Nebula Intelligence announced the introduction of Baidu to complete a new round of strategic financing, accelerating the development and marketing process of DPU chips.
quietly, DPU has become a "soldiers must fight for" by major Internet manufacturers.
Why do major Internet companies invest in DPU?
Let’s start with the application scenario of DPU.
From a technical perspective, DPU mainly undertakes the CPU's network data operation and maintenance and scheduling work, aiming to meet the network-side dedicated computing needs, especially for scenarios with a large number of servers and strict data transmission rates. In short, DPU can free up CPU computing resources and drive cost reduction and efficiency improvement in the overall data center.
From the perspective of specific scenarios, DPU is mainly used in data centers, communications and network security fields, and the customer base is mostly large Internet companies, large public cloud service providers, and large telecom operators. Before the emergence of a large number of startups, downstream data center vendors such as China Mobile, , Alibaba Cloud, , etc. had already been actively deploying DPU products. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud's Shenlong architecture was unveiled and is regarded by the industry as one of the most successful DPU chips.
Generally speaking, major Internet manufacturers and cloud computing manufacturers are most familiar with their own needs and usage scenarios, and self-developed DPU chips are more reasonable. But a realistic problem is in front of them - Time .
The technical person in charge of a major Internet manufacturer once explained that it is difficult and takes a long time to independently develop a large chip like a DPU. Without long-term accumulation of chip talents and experience, it is difficult to meet the computing needs of independent chip development. Generally speaking, it will take at least 2-3 years for a DPU to be designed to form a real hardware system.
Another element that cannot be ignored is that the development of the DPU market is closely related to the upgrade of data centers, and the bandwidth upgrade cycle of data centers is about 3 years. At this cycle pace, the next year will soon enter the replacement period of the next generation of data center equipment. Especially driven by the tide of east and west calculations, the construction process of data centers has also been greatly advanced. As a result, the investment of large Internet companies in DPU companies is more conducive to business development.
Of course, investing in chips by major Internet manufacturers is a win-win situation for all parties - not only can they directly provide a large number of orders, but the founders of DPU startups also hope to break through the technical bottlenecks together with industrial capital and promote the commercialization of products.
Scenario test is the most critical link in the commercialization process of major DPU startups. An investor from Shanghai's strategic investment background admitted that DPU is a software-defined computing architecture and is not suitable for taking the general route. Startups must be closely linked to actual business scenarios in order to better achieve commercialization.
In addition to technical barriers, startups also need to continue to iterate, especially in conjunction with the continuous upgrade of open source software to adapt to customers' rapidly changing software and hardware environment . The founder of a newly established DPU company bluntly said: "When we choose to invest in investors, we will pay attention to whether they understand the industry, whether they can import industrial resources to the project, and bring substantial help to the business."
Therefore, when the founders of DPU startups choose investors, they often reserve some shares for industrial investors.
DPU is a big track full of imagination space. As one entrepreneur shares, the number of DPUs in the future may exceed GPUs. Each server may not have a GPU, but there must be one or more DPUs , just like each server must be equipped with network card .
According to statistics, the global DPU industry market size will reach US$3.05 billion in 2020, and it is expected to exceed US$24.53 billion (approximately RMB 166.5 billion) by 2025. What’s more important is that whoever occupys this territory will grasp the important barriers of the entire data center and network center. At present, DPU is still a blue ocean market, and , neither VC/PE nor industrial capital, is willing to miss the opportunity to board the ship.
Once upon a time, the main investment base of Internet giants was still the traffic industries such as consumption, entertainment, and the Internet. Now, they have their own business scenarios and have begun to turn around and enter the hard technology battlefield. gives money to orders, which may be the best era for Chinese semiconductors.
