QingCloud, a cloud computing platform offering IaaS-based cloud services, announced that they have secured a 100 million USD Series C financing today, led by two RMB funds with participation from existing investor BlueRun Ventures.
The new capital will be used for R&D and the construction of cloud infrastructure, the statement added.
Co-founded by Richard Huang, Reno Gan and Spencer Lin in May 2014, the company launched the QingCloud platform in July 2013 to provide on-demand real-time cloud computing services to enterprise customers. The company now claims to have over 45,000 enterprise customers from both traditional and emerging industries.
QingCloud CEO and Co-founder, Richard Huang, said that “with the help of this round of financing, QingCloud will increase investments in R&D and infrastructure construction to maintain a healthy development pace, and to create more values to enterprise customers with our technology and reliable services.”
After this capital injection, QingCloud’s total funding has reached 122 million USD. The company received a 2 million series A from BluRun Ventures in 2012, and a 20 million series B led by Lightspeed China Partners and joined by Matrix Partners China and BlueRun Ventures in 2013.
China’s rising cloud service market is becoming more complex with the entry of a spate of domestic and international players. In addition to services that have an established presence in China’s cloud sector, like Alibaba’s Aliyun, Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, plenty of Chinese internet giants are also making forays into the sector.
Tencent plans to throw in 10 billion yuan in cloud computing cooperation, they announced last year, while LeCloud, the cloud-computing unit of LeEco, just secured a 1 billion yuan series A last week. Moreover, well-funded smaller players are also developing quickly such as UCloud and Qiniu.
Image credit: ShutterStock
Cloud computing does seem to be ramping up very quickly in China. It would be interesting to see if positions there have the same level of competitiveness as in the US, where cloud-computing experts can be paid as much as $300,000-$1,000,000 a year: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/07/technology/tech-companies-new-and-old-clamor-to-entice-cloud-computing-experts.html?_r=0
From my experience, the industry is so nascent here that there really aren’t cloud computing experts yet. The engineers and developers working in the field are earning peanuts compared to what they would in the U.S. An experienced CTO at a tech firm in Zhongguancun might earn 30k RMB. A skilled programmer or product manager likely won’t make more than 25k. The work-life balance and perks on the job are also lagging far, far behind what skilled tech talent would expect in the West.