Sherman Ye founded VESoft in 2018 when he saw a growing demand for graph databases in China. Its predecessors, like Neo4j and TigerGraph, had already been growing aggressively in the West for a few years, while China was just getting to know the technology that leverages graph structures to store data sets and depict their relationships, such as those used for social media analysis, e-commerce recommendations and financial risk management.

VESoft is ready for further growth after closing an $8 million funding round led by Redpoint China Ventures, an investment firm launched by Silicon Valley-based Redpoint Ventures in 2005. Existing investor Matrix Partners China also participated in the Series pre-A round. The new capital will allow the startup to develop products and expand to markets in North America, Europe and other parts of Asia.

The 30-people team is comprised of former employees from Alibaba, Facebook, Huawei and IBM. It’s based in Hangzhou, a scenic city known for its rich history and housing Alibaba and its financial affiliate Ant Financial, where Ye previously worked as a senior engineer after his four-year stint with Facebook in California. From 2017 to 2018, the entrepreneur noticed that Ant Financial’s customers were increasingly interested in adopting graph databases as an alternative to relational databases, a model that had been popular since the 80s and normally organizes data into tables.

“While relational databases are capable of achieving many functions carried out by graph databases… they deteriorate in performance as the quantity of data grows,” Ye told TechCrunch during an interview. “We didn’t use to have so much data.”

Information explosion is one reason why Chinese companies are turning to graph databases, which can handle millions of transactions to discover patterns within scattered data. The technology’s rise is also a response to new forms of online businesses that depend more on relationships.

“Take recommendations for example. The old model recommends content based purely on user profiles, but the problem of relying on personal browsing history is it fails to recommend new things. That was fine for a long time as the Chinese [internet] market was big enough to accommodate many players. But as the industry becomes saturated and crowded… companies need to ponder how to retain existing users, lengthen their time spent, and win users from rivals.”

The key lies in serving people content and products they find appealing. Graph databases come in handy, suggested Ye, when services try to predict users’ interest or behavior as the model uncovers what their friends or people within their social circles like. “That’s a lot more effective than feeding them what’s trending.”

Neo4j compares relational and graph databases (Link)

The company has made its software open source, which the founder believed can help cultivate a community of graph database users and educate the market in China. It will also allow VESoft to reach more engineers in the English-speaking world who are well-acquainted with the open-source culture.

“There is no such thing as being ‘international’ or ‘domestic’ for a technology-driven company. There are no boundaries between countries in the open-source world,” reckoned Ye.

When it comes to generating income, the startup plans to launch a paid version for enterprises, which will come with customized plug-ins and host services.

The Nebula Graph, the brand of VESoft’s database product, is now serving 20 enterprise clients from areas across social media, e-commerce and finance, including big names like food delivery giant Meituan, popular social commerce app Xiaohongshu and e-commerce leader JD.com. A number of overseas companies are also trialing Nebula.

The time is ripe for enterprise-facing startups with a technological moat in China as the market for consumers has been divided by incumbents like Tencent and Alibaba. This makes fundraising relatively easy for VESoft. The founder is confident that Chinese companies are rapidly catching up with their Western counterparts in the space, for the gargantuan amount of data and the myriad of ways data is used in the country “will propel the technology forward.”

The OpenStack Foundation today announced that StarlingX, a container-based system for running edge deployments, is now a top-level project. With this, it joins the main OpenStack private and public cloud infrastructure project, the Airship lifecycle management system, Kata Containers and the Zuul CI/CD platform.

What makes StarlingX a bit different from some of these other projects is that it is a full stack for edge deployments — and in that respect, it’s maybe more akin to OpenStack than the other projects in the foundation’s stable. It uses open-source components from the Ceph storage platform, the KVM virtualization solution, Kubernetes and, of course, OpenStack and Linux. The promise here is that StarlingX can provide users with an easy way to deploy container and VM workloads to the edge, all while being scalable, lightweight and providing low-latency access to the services hosted on the platform.

Early StarlingX adopters include China UnionPay, China Unicom and T-Systems. The original codebase was contributed to the foundation by Intel and Wind River System in 2018. Since then, the project has seen 7,108 commits from 211 authors.

“The StarlingX community has made great progress in the last two years, not only in building great open source software but also in building a productive and diverse community of contributors,” said Ildiko Vancsa, ecosystem technical lead at the OpenStack Foundation. “The core platform for low-latency and high-performance applications has been enhanced with a container-based, distributed cloud architecture, secure booting, TPM device enablement, certificate management and container isolation. StarlingX 4.0, slated for release later this year, will feature enhancements such as support for Kata Containers as a container runtime, integration of the Ussuri version of OpenStack, and containerization of the remaining platform services.”

It’s worth remembering that the OpenStack Foundation has gone through a few changes in recent years. The most important of these is that it is now taking on other open-source infrastructure projects that are not part of the core OpenStack project but are strategically aligned with the organization’s mission. The first of these to graduate out of the pilot project phase and become top-level projects were Kata Containers and Zuul in April 2019, with Airship joining them in October.

Currently, the only pilot project for the OpenStack Foundation is its OpenInfra Labs project, a community of commercial vendors and academic institutions, including the likes of Boston University, Harvard, MIT, Intel and Red Hat, that are looking at how to better test open-source code in production-like environments.

APIs provide a way to build connections to a set of disparate applications and data sources, and can help simplify a lot of the complex integration issues companies face. Postman has built an enterprise API platform and today it got rewarded with a $150 million Series C investment on a whopping $2 billion valuation — all during a pandemic.

Insight Partners led the round with help from existing investors CRV and Nexus Venture Partners. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $207 million, according to the company. That includes a $50 million Series B from a year ago, making it $200 million raised in just a year. That’s a lot of cash.

Abhinav Asthana, CEO and co-founder at Postman, says that what’s attracting all that dough is an end-to-end platform for building APIs. “We help developers, QA, DevOps — anybody who is in the business of building APIs — work on the same platform. They can use our tools for designing, documentation, testing and monitoring to build high quality APIs, and they do that faster.” Asthana told TechCrunch.

He says that he was not actively looking for funding before this round came together. In fact, he says that investors approached him after the pandemic shut everything down in California in March, and he sees it as a form of validation for the startup.

“We think it shows the strength of the company. We have phenomenal adoption across developers and enterprises and the pandemic has [not had much of an impact on us]. The company has been receiving crazy inbound interest [from investors],” he said.

He didn’t want to touch the question of going public just yet, but he feels the hefty valuation sends a message to the market that this is a solid company that is going to be around for the long term.

Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at lead investor Insight Partners certainly sees it that way. “The combination of the market opportunity, the management team and Postman’s proven track record of success shows that they are ready to become the software industry’s next great success,” he said in a statement.

Today the company has around 250 employees divided between the US and Bangalore in India, and he sees doubling that number in the next year. One thing the pandemic has shown him is that his employees can work from anywhere and he intends to hire people across the world to take advantage of the most diverse talent pool possible.

“Looking for diverse talent as part of our large community as we build this workforce up is going to be a key way in which we want to solve this. Along with that, we are bringing people from diverse communities into our events and making sure that we are constantly in touch with those communities, which should help us build up a very strong diverse kind of hiring function,” he said.

He added, “We want to be deliberate about that, and over the coming months we will also shed more light on what specifically we are doing.”

No business is immune to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve seen Airbnb — a company particularly susceptible to this black swan event — go through an insane design sprint. Even enterprise collaboration tools have felt it, with Box readjusting its product road map to focus on how the tool worked for remote employees.

InVision has also seen the change in its users behavior and adapted accordingly. Freehand, the company’s collaborative whiteboarding tool has seen a huge surge in users and the startup has added a handful of new features to the product.

The company says that Freehand is seeing 130% growth in weekly active users since March.

New features include sticky notes that come in multiple color, size and text options, as well as templates to give teams a jumping off point for their whiteboarding exercise. Freehand has six new templates to start — brainstorming, wireframing, retrospectives, standups, diagrams and ice breakers — with more to be added more soon.

InVision has also added a “presenting” mode to Freehand.

Because this virtual whiteboard has no space constraints, it can literally zoom out to infinity and is restricted only by the imagination of the team working on it. In “presenting” mode, a team leader can take over the view of the virtual whiteboard to guide their team through one part of the content at a time.

Freehand has an integration with Microsoft Teams and Slack, and also has a new shortcut where users can type “freehand.new” into any browser to start on a fresh whiteboard.

Interestingly, the user growth around Freehand doesn’t just come from the usual suspects of design, product and engineering teams. Departments across organizations, including HR, marketing and IT teams, are coming to Freehand to collaborate on projects and tasks. More than 60 percent of Freehand users are not coming from the design team.

InVision has also added some fine-tuning features, such as a brand new toolbar to allow for easier drawing of shapes, alignment, color and opacity features, and better controls for turning lines into precise arrows or end-points for diagrams.

One of the most interesting things about Freehand is that it allows for democratized access to the whiteboard itself. With no restraints on time or space, and with no one gatekeeping up at the front of the room holding the marker, all members of a team can go in and add their thoughts and ideas to the whiteboard before, during or after a meeting.

“One of the nice things about a whiteboard or a virtual whiteboard like this one is it removes the aspects of the restrictions of time and space, so teams can have more efficient meetings where they get the benefit of democratic input without the cost of having only one person at a time being able to speak or add,” said David Fraga, InVision President. “It offers a synchronous collision of collaboration.”

InVision has raised a total of $350 million from investors like FirstMark, Spark, Battery, Accel and Tiger Global Management. The company now boasts more than 7 million total registered users, with 100 of the Fortune 100 companies using the product. InVision is also part of the $100 million ARR club.