Build a super application platform in the AI era. "Huanjie Cloud Computing" receives strategic investment from Alibaba Cloud | 36Kr exclusive.

36Kr has learned that Zhuhai Huanjie Cloud Computing Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Huanjie Cloud Computing") recently announced the completion of a Pre-A financing of 37.5 million yuan, exclusively invested by Alibaba Cloud.

Before this, Huanjie Cloud Computing has accumulated three rounds of financing. Among them, the angel round financing was led by MiraclePlus, with Li Jun, the dean of the School of Information at Tsinghua University, and Kang Yi, a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China's Microelectronics Institute, participating in the investment.

Huanjie Cloud Computing was established in March 2022. Its core product, Sealos, is a cloud operating system with Kubernetes as its core. In addition, the company also has the well-known open-source project FastGPT, which is an AI knowledge base product.

The traditional operating system runs on a single machine, while for many distributed applications nowadays, they inherently need to run on multiple machines, and application developers need to spend a lot of energy to manage numerous machines.

Therefore, the cloud operating system emerges as the times require. It can automatically adjust computing resources according to user needs, improve the utilization rate of resources, and reduce operating costs. It can also significantly reduce the complexity of development and operation and maintenance, making it more convenient for users to obtain and use resources.

In the overseas market, a number of startups, such as Vercel, Render, Superbase, etc., have emerged, providing functions similar to the cloud operating system, which proves that there is a huge demand for this service in the market.

Huanjie Cloud Computing is committed to making the cloud operating system simple and popular. Fang Haitao, the founder and CEO of the company, told 36Kr: "Sealos allows users to build a cloud with one command, making it as simple to use as a personal PC, reducing the cost to 1/5 and improving the efficiency by several times."

Specifically, the cloud operating system Sealos developed by Huanjie mainly focuses on two aspects of applications:

The first is how the developed applications can be hosted. The Sealos application market can install various distributed applications as simply as installing software on a single computer operating system. The default application integrates some frequently used basic capabilities, such as databases and object storage.

The second is how new applications are born. The Sealos Devbox application solves all the things for users except writing code, such as development environment configuration, load balancing, creation of the dependent database, release version, and launch. It abandons the previous complicated processes or CI/CD, directly faces the results, and can also be combined with AI Coding tools such as Cursor and Tongyi Lingma to significantly improve efficiency.

"Sealos currently serves both developers and B-end enterprises. Our cloud operating system helps reduce the time and energy consumption of developers in environment configuration, system maintenance, etc.; helps B-end enterprises achieve automated operation and maintenance management and resource optimization, achieving efficient and low-cost business operations, and has been widely recognized by the market." Fang Haitao said.

According to Fang Haitao, since its establishment two years ago, Huanjie Cloud Computing has served more than 300,000 users, with a monthly income of more than 1.6 million yuan. Among them, there are more than 2,000 enterprise-level users, including more than 100 leading customers for privatization services, including Yili Group, Leapmotor, Snow Beer, Yadea Electric Vehicle, OPPEIN Home, Ugreen, AO Smith, etc.

In the open-source community, Huanjie Cloud has cultivated a considerable user base. Up to now, Sealos has 14,000 stars, and the download volume has exceeded 1.4 million. FastGPT has 18,000 stars, becoming the choice of many enterprises to build an AI knowledge base. At the same time, the company has also won the "Top 50 Global Fastest-growing Open-source Startup" title selected by Runa Capital.

(Note: Star is a way for open-source community users to recognize and support a project. The more stars a project has, it usually means that the project has a wider user group, more contributors, and more followers.)

With the arrival of the AI era, the cloud operating system is ushering in a new development opportunity. Currently, the AI large model significantly shortens the cycle of application creation and also expands the group capable of creating applications by tens or hundreds of times, which means that the "application explosion" era is coming. And improving the efficiency of application development is one of the strengths of Sealos.

"Sealos is the 'seller of shovels' in the era of the application explosion. We hope to build a super application platform that allows applications to be quickly created in a smart way in the cloud operating system." Fang Haitao told 36Kr.

Regarding this strategic investment from Alibaba Cloud, Fang Haitao said that Sealos can not only reduce infrastructure costs, improve the cost performance of the product, but also enhance market trust with the endorsement of Alibaba Cloud. Especially in the overseas market, this cooperation will give full play to the advantages of both sides and enhance the competitiveness of Sealos' overseas products and services.

In terms of the team, Huanjie Cloud Computing has gathered a group of technical experts. The company has more than 35 employees, and the proportion of R & D personnel reaches 80%.

The company's founder, Fang Haitao, once worked at Alibaba Cloud, led the sealer project and donated it to the CNCF Foundation; the co-founder Luan Shaotong was recommended for undergraduate admission to the University of Science and Technology of China due to his excellent programming skills and won the second place in the StarCraft AI Algorithm Competition in the world; another co-founder and technical director - Zeng Zhen served as the technical partner of the startup Bcy, which was later acquired by ByteDance.