Historically, the emphasis of IT operation and maintenance innovation has been primarily centered on monitoring tools and data analysis, with comparatively little attention paid to ITSM application development. ZKNOW's low-code, no-code PaaS platform effectively addresses the challenges of flexible configuration and personalization in various stages of the product development lifecycle, including R&D, project management, operation, and maintenance.
Shanghai Zhenzhi Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "ZKNOW", Chinese: 甄知科技), headquartered in Shanghai, announced on June 21 that it has completed a new round of financing of over CNY 10 million, jointly invested by several entrepreneurs and industrial capital. This round of financing funds will be used for product development and market expansion with 39% of shares held by Hand Enterprise Solutions (Chinese: 汉得信息). Previously, ZKNOW completed a CNY 70 million first round of financing in March 2022, jointly led by Blue Lake Capital (Chinese: 蓝湖资本) and Matrix Partners China (Chinese: 经纬创投), and followed by BV Baidu Ventures (Chinese: BV百度风投) and An’s Information (Chinese: 信公小安).
Founded in 2021, ZKNOW is a leading service management digitalization enterprise, incubated by the industry's well-known enterprise digitalization comprehensive service provider - HAND Enterprise Solutions Co., Ltd. With its core products Zknow Platform (Chinese: 燕千云) and Choerodon Platform (Chinese: 猪齿鱼), it provides users with SaaS management platform and PaaS customization capability for intelligent IT operation and maintenance, humanized staff service, all-round customer success and visualization software development. This significantly aids businesses across a range of industries in transforming and upgrading their digital intelligence.
In terms of product architecture, ZKNOW Platform, the company's flagship product, is supported by the backend architecture of HAND Enterprise Solutions' service experience and creates a flexible middle office. In 2022, the ZKNOW Platform successfully integrated multi-channel service capabilities, encompassing online customer service, call center, email, instant messaging, and other related features. Furthermore, ZKNOW platform launched customer success business solutions, specifically designed for enterprise service SaaS, which assisted SaaS enterprises in attaining customer success. According to Huang Jianhua, the Founder and Chairman of ZKNOW, many companies that operate under the SaaS model in the industry need the capacity to construct PaaS only after a prolonged period of business development to circumvent the issue of customization. However, ZKNOW has already accomplished this aspect of capability reserve through previous accumulation.
After this round of financing, the company will continue to invest in R&D expenses to build the core competitiveness of its products. The projected business growth rate is anticipated to exceed 70% on an annual basis, with a forecasted customer base of over 1,000 by the year 2027. Additionally, the cumulative sign-ups for annual recurring revenue and generated revenues are expected to surpass CNY 100 million, while profits are estimated to exceed CNY 10 million.
The major competitors of ZKNOW include Chinese companies such as WOFENG Technology (Chinese: 沃丰科技) and Cloudwise (Chinese: 云智慧), as well as international players such as ServiceNow and BMC Software from the US.
In the future, ZKNOW envisions a gradual expansion of its business operations from IT service management to encompass enterprise service management and customer service management. This expansion aims to cover the entirety of enterprises’ internal and external service management. Additionally, ZKNOW seeks to leverage AI capabilities to drive platform development and create an intelligent and advanced enterprise service management platform, known as AITSM. This platform will utilize various data sources to provide intelligent suggestions for incident response and problem handling processes, thereby enabling repeatable operations and task automation to facilitate business innovation for enterprises.