Resilient scaling, wide area coverage and ultra-low latency are the strengths of PPIO.
PPIO (Chinese: PPIO边缘云), an edge cloud service provider, completed a Series A round of funding worth CNY 250 million ( USD37.48 million).
The round was co-invested by Panlin Capital, China Creation Ventures, ZJ Venture, and IMO Ventures. Existing shareholders Bluerun Ventures, AlphaX Partners and Hua Capital also made follow-on investment in the startup.
The money will be mainly used to build self-research technology and edge-side infrastructure, and to explore scenarios with improved demand for ultra-low latency, such as ultra-low latency live streaming, cloud gaming, cloud rendering, vehicle networking, and spatial digitization.
This is another new round of funding for PPIO since it completed a Pre-Series A funding round worth hundreds of millions of CNY in 2021. By now, the company's cumulative funding has exceeded CNY 400 million ( USD60 million).
Founded in 2018, PPIO was co-founded by Yao Xin and Chief Architect Wang Wenyu. The company currently focuses on providing customers with edge cloud computing solutions that meet the needs of low latency, high bandwidth and massive data distribution and processing.
According to the calculations of iResearch (Chinese: 艾瑞咨询), the number of IoT connections in China will grow from 5.5 billion in 2019 to 14.8 billion in 2023, with a compound annual growth rate of 28.1%. IDC predicts that the amount of data generated in China will grow by 48.6 ZB per year in 2025.
Yao Xin said in an interview that many new scenarios have emerged that require a new level of latency, so expanding the commercial scenarios of edge cloud has become the current thing to do.
As a ToB cloud service company, cost is an issue that cannot be ignored. Yao Xin added that the edge cloud services provided by PPIO can be scaled elastically on the original central cloud architecture, thus reducing costs. Simply put, the product is billed only after it has been used.
In the past two years, many companies are facing new challenges in the context of the global epidemic and geo-conflicts. Yao Xin talked about the need to be pragmatic as a startup company in an interview with EqualOcean. He proposed an idea called "from new wine in old bottles to new wine in new bottles". In detail, it is to use new technology for the next generation to solve the existing customer’s needs first. Currently PPIO is focusing on solving customers' audio and video entertainment needs. During the epidemic, the requirements of online office and teaching are becoming more diversified, so how to make video conference smoother and background keying more realistic are the key concerns of PPIO.
Yao Xin mentioned that PPIO's future development idea is to first improve the technology level, accumulate experience and capability, and then continuously expand into new areas.
In the short term, PPIO focuses on the needs of audio / video, real-time interaction, games, cloud rendering and other consumer entertainment; while in the medium and long term, the development of new scenarios such as Internet of Vehicles, Internet of Things, metaverse, digital twin and virtual human would be its next targets.
"Sense of mission" is a key word repeatedly mentioned by Yao Xin in the interview.
When he founded PPTV in 2004, the internet was not widespread in China, the quality of network broadband was poor, and the loading speed of picture news was very slow. Against this background, Yao Xin's team hopes to use technology to establish a platform to jointly build and connect everyone's computers in China, so that everyone can enjoy the video era in advance. In the second venture, namely the establishment of PPIO, Yao Xin proposed the mission of pooling global computing resources and providing services to the world.
The current competitors of PPIO include Cloudflare, Vapor IO, and StackPath.