As traditional enterprises seek transformation, they often face the problem of legacy IT infrastructure. Enterprise customers expect agile adjustment and keen business intelligence to counteract the problem.
DEEPEXI(滴普科技) closed its Series A round of funding, co-led by Morningside, Hillhouse Capital, and IDG Capital. As the concept of 'middleware' gets hotter, DEEPEXI claims its positioning is now beyond middleware.
Founded in 2018, DEEPEXI positioned itself as a full-stack provider of intellectualized enterprise digitalization platforms. The startup has raised three rounds or financing in the past year. After one year of steady growth, it has expanded from Beijing to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Nanjing and Chengdu, with over 500 employees and team members who previously worked in Alibaba, Huawei, AWS, IBM and Oracle.
"Middleware is not what enterprises want to achieve”, Zhao Jiehui (赵杰辉), CEO of DEEPEXI, told EO. “But agile innovation and business intelligence are their key expectations, which means having a fast response to business innovation needs and real-time online analytics support over large-scale data.”
According to an Oracle paper on digital business, middleware is the foundation of a digital cloud platform that enables the building and refining of applications, business processes and entire line-of-business offerings without retooling. As traditional enterprises seek transformation, the hurdle of older IT infrastructure often gets in their way. Rigid information systems prevent corporations from embracing evolving new market opportunities.
DEEPEXI aims to use cloud architecture to rebuild enterprise IT services, which would involve more AI and IoT technologies. In terms of customer positioning, DEEPEXI approaches customers based on their positions in the value chain instead of a purely industry-based hierarchy. So far, the company specializes in consumer engagement (including sales, retail, channel and membership management), smart manufacturing and smart real estate scenarios.
The company offers on-premises deployment as well as cloud-based within a much shorter period compared with traditional IT development. Taking retail chains Showyu (秀域) as an example, it takes only one a half months for DEEPEXI to deliver the products to over 1,200 retail stores, traditionally often taking years to deploy. After initial deployment, it takes one to two weeks for DEEPEXI to deal with the increasing new business for Showyu.
So far, DEEPEXI has served many Chinese new retail customers such as Pagoda (百果园), AFIONA (妍丽), Showyu(秀域), Wanke (万客), China Macro (万家乐) and Trendy Group (赫基国际), as well as domestic OEMs such as Geely and OPPO, with average transaction volume (ATV) over millions of yuan and revenues approaching hundreds of millions of yuan.
The idea of middleware is indeed getting popular. Besides IT middleware which DEEPEXI focuses on, data middleware and business middleware are often mentioned in the middleware discussion. At the beginning of the month, data middleware specialist Value Simplex raised tens of millions of yuan.