In recent years, DPU has been exceptionally hot. In addition to traditional chip giants actively laying out DPU product research and development, more than ten DPU startups have emerged in China, including Xinqiyuan, Zhongke Yushu, Yunbao Intelligent, Xingyun Zhilian, and others. At the same time, capital has also entered the track intensively with large amounts of capital
DPU is the third important computing power chip in data centers, following CPU and GPU. Its function is to unload some of the CPU's computing power and release it into upper level applications, supporting infrastructure layer services such as storage, security, and service quality management, helping users obtain ultra-high cost performance computing power, effectively overcoming communication delays, and improving data security levels.
Hot DPU track
As a "highway" of data, DPU is facing a market of hundreds of billions. According to research predictions, by 2025, China alone will have a market capacity of 4 billion US dollars.
In this 100 billion market, international chip giants such as Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, Broadcom and other manufacturers are actively laying out the research and development of DPU products, and Nvidia, Intel and Broadcom occupy most of the market shares in China.
In the past few years, the domestic DPU market has been developing crazily, with startups rapidly launching products in order to seize the market. At the same time, capital is also entering intensively, including Xinqiyuan, Zhongke Yushu, Yunbao Intelligent, Xingyun Zhilian, Dayu Zhixin, Yunmai Xinlian, Edge Zhixin, Yisixin Technology, Qingxin Semiconductor, etc.
In the field of DPU/smart network cards, Xinqiyuan can provide a full stack solution from chips, boards, driver software, and a complete set of cloud networks,
The product Agilio can support 2 million security rules and provide throughput of up to 100Gb/s and 28Mpps, while consuming only one tenth of the computing resources to provide scalable universal computing network functionality. The company has obtained multiple batches of smart network card orders from top domestic operators, and has conducted in-depth technical docking with major server manufacturers, OTT, BAT and other customers.
Xin Qiyuan completed multiple rounds of financing for Pre A2/A3/A4 in 2021, each with a financing amount of hundreds of millions of yuan. Last month, it received a strategic investment of over 100 million yuan, led by Shanghai Chaoyue Moore, a subsidiary of the National Integrated Circuit Industry Fund. The old shareholder Yuntai Capital continues to firmly invest, and the funds will be used for the research and development of next-generation DPU products and the commercialization of current products.
Zhongke Yushu has independently developed the KPU chip architecture and created the industry's first DPU chip and smart network card series products and solutions with integrated network database acceleration function. At present, based on the first generation product, the company is currently developing the second generation DPU chip K2, which has completed design and verification work. It is expected to be put into production in the first quarter of 2022.
Zhongke Yushu has completed two rounds of financing in less than half a year of 2021. Currently, the company has joined forces with partners such as exchanges and multiple top securities firms to enter the financial computing industry. After continuing to raise funds, it will continue to promote the application and implementation of DPU solutions for customer types such as data centers and telecommunications operators, and cooperate with information innovation ecological partners to further expand customer channels after product adaptation, Gradually assist more clients in the information and innovation industry, as well as government clients, in solving computing power problems.
Yunbao Intelligent was founded in 2020. As a semiconductor company in the software definition DPU industry, the company has successfully developed a full-featured cloud DPU network card solution, which fully supports the integration of bare metal, virtual machine and container cloud services, as well as high-performance 2x25G networks, and provides one-stop solutions such as elastic storage, elastic Sexual network, virtualization management and security acceleration.
At the beginning of this year, Yunbao Intelligence and Suiyuan Technology reached a strategic cooperation, relying on their respective software and hardware advantages in the DPU and AI computing fields, to jointly develop a large-scale high-performance AI computing platform and provide more efficient solutions for cloud AI computing.
In terms of financing, Yunbao Intelligent will complete the angel round financing in April 2021. The investors include Tencent Investment, Sequoia Capital, Yaotu Capital, Zhongxin Juyuan, Huaye Tiancheng, Zhengxin Valley Capital and other well-known investment institutions.
Xingyun Zhilian was established on March 22, 2021, focusing on the research and development of data center basic interconnection communication architecture and DPU chips. Just one year after its establishment, the company has completed multiple rounds of financing. In April, July, and August 2021, it completed angel rounds, Pre A rounds, and A rounds of financing, with investors including Hillhouse Venture Capital and Huadeng International. The A round was exclusively invested by Meituan, and in February of this year, the company completed a new round of strategic financing, which was invested by Baidu
