SHANGHAI, Mar. 5, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Caicloud, a Chinese startup that provides Kubernetes-based cluster management service and enterprise deep learning solutions, today announced that it has raised a $6 million Series A funding led by Matrix Partners China with follow-on investments by Cybernaut. This comes after a previous angel investment from Cybernaut in July 2015.
Caicloud was founded by several ex-Googlers, who were formally core contributors to the Google cluster management system and machine learning platform in the Pittsburgh office. They are also CMU alumni consisting of research experts, ACM medal winners, and gold medal winners in robotics world competitions.
Today, the company also launched its latest Kubernetes-based Cluster-as-a-Service product (ClaaS 2.0). Leveraging the powerful computing framework provided by Kubernetes, Caicloud released the first "TensorFlow-as-a-Service" (TaaS) 1.1 running on top of ClaaS, forming a complete and unique "Cloud + AI" solutions for enterprises.
Caicloud's ClaaS 1.0 was launched in Dec. 2015 and has been seamlessly integrated with most popular public clouds in China and with on-premise infrastructures such as VMware, OpenStack, or bare-mental. ClaaS 1.0 has provided robust enterprise k8s distribution to multiple Fortune 500 companies in China. The newer ClaaS 2.0 launched today adds more cluster management features that go beyond just container management and complement the mainstream Kubernetes with richer security management, DevOps capabilities, application orchestration, and troubleshooting intelligence.
Caicloud initially released TaaS 1.0 in Feb. 2017. Built on top of Kubernetes and ClaaS, TaaS provides distributed, GPU-enhanced TensorFlow-based deep learning tools and models to transform enterprise rich dataset into invaluable business insights. TaaS adopts the "Cloud Artificial Intelligence (CAI)" philosophy and makes cluster management and DevOps more intelligent. The complete ClaaS+TaaS solution enables automatic anomaly detection, autonomous service lifecycle management, data-driven troubleshooting, and multiple industry- specific ultra-fast AI solutions such as time-series predication, audio/video classification, etc. Compared to TaaS 1.0 that can only run on enterprise on-premise infrastructures, TaaS 1.1 is integrated with Microsoft Azure public cloud to provide public TensorFlow services.
"This is definitely a milestone for us today. One thing is that we are announcing Series A funding from Matrix Partners China, a top-tier venture capital firm that focuses on enterprise services, though we actually closed the deal in Dec. 2016. More importantly, we're proud to deliver ClaaS 2.0 and TaaS 1.1 with unique values that have never been seen before," said Xin Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Caicloud. "We leverage but go beyond Kubernetes to empower enterprise customers to really maximize the value of the physical resources and the dataset they already possess."
Besides its commercial products, Caicloud has also been an active open source player and the leader of the Kubernetes/CNCF community in China. Caicloud includes multiple Kubernetes contributors and maintainers, has open-sourced multiple original Kubernetes plugins and tools, and has open-sourced the first Kubernetes-native CI/CD project called Cyclone in Nov. 2016 (github.com/caicloud).
Starting from Q4 2016, the integrated ClaaS + TaaS solution stack has been proven powerful in large Chinese enterprise accounts and is now generally available.
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