This week, Xuanxing Technology announced the completion of a multi-million yuan angel round of financing from Sequoia China Seed Fund, which is mainly used for product research and development. This is an enterprise services company that wants to start from a process mining perspective to help enterprises collect and analyze process data in real time to improve the inefficiency of business processes.
If you want to say a specific point, this set of processes can be expressed as: by collecting and cleaning the information logs stored in the various information systems of the enterprise, using the visual view to restore the actual business flow of the enterprise, to help the enterprise find problem points from the process that deviates from the standard process, the enterprise can propose to improve, measure and optimize the business process accordingly. The system then automates the process according to the predetermined process after modeling. It is reported that the product modules released by Xuanxing Technology include data flow services, process mining, monitoring and early warning and process automation.
The founding team has extensive experience in consulting and management of large enterprises. Hu Shichao, CEO of Xuanxing Technology, was the global R&D director of UiPath, a software company that developed a robotic process automation platform, Hu Shichao is the company's highest-ranking Chinese executive, in addition, he also served as the chief R&D manager of the cloud computing and artificial intelligence department at Microsoft headquarters; Zheng Zhixian, the president, was a co-founder of Wonder Information and also served as the consulting director of HP Enterprise Services Group.
Looking forward at the information of Xuanxing Technology, this round of shares is also the main body of Tongchuang Weiye, and just over two months ago, the company just introduced ByteDance as a shareholder.
Corporate order conversion rate increased to 60%, revenue increased by 150%
Xuanxing Technology positions itself as the Chinese version of Celonis. In the foreign enterprise service market, Xuanxing Technology's two companies, Celonis and Uipath, where Hu Shichao once worked, represent the development direction of the industry.
Celonis, a star company in Germany, completed a Series D round of $1 billion financing last year, valued at more than $11 billion. The company has developed a set of process mining techniques that analyze data from the company's event logs, analyze problems with certain processes, and figure out ways to streamline those processes. The Execution Management System (EMS) consists of a combination of real-time data access, process mining, simulation and forecasting, daily process management, and process automation.
Another star company, UiPath, was also a star unicorn in the United States before going public. After landing on the New York Stock Exchange last April, UiPath publicly offered 23.9 million shares for $56, raising nearly $1.34 billion and achieving a market capitalization of $35.8 billion on the day of listing. This makes UiPath the first RPA software platform to land on the U.S. stock market, and it is also another enterprise-level software unicorn that has entered the capital market after the successful listing of enterprise service giants such as Zoom and Snowflake.
The so-called RPA (Robotic Process Automation), referring to robot process automation, is a solution that can simulate humans to perform repetitive tasks, which can achieve overall scheduling, automate business processing, and improve the efficiency of business workflow processing. According to the "2021 China RPA Industry Development Insight Report", it is expected that the size of China's RPA market will reach 2.42 billion yuan in 2021 and 8.18 billion yuan in 2024.
What the two companies share is the future of digital transformation. A founder of the field once proposed in a speech that UiPath first did RPA, and then acquired a process mining company, Celonis first did process mining, and then acquired an RPA company, both of which are the same way, the ultimate goal of digital transformation is DTO (Digital Twin Organization), a concept related to the metaverse - in the digital world, to build a software model corresponding to the organization in the physical world.
Digital transformation can bring real profits to enterprises. Deloitte has calculated in its RPA report that if a Fortune 1000 company with revenues of $20 billion and 50,000 employees could complete 20% of its workflows with this automation, it could generate more than $30 million in profits per year.
According to the information provided by Xuanxing Technology, its service value has been preliminarily verified in the communication industry, and under the condition that the customer's marketing costs remain unchanged, through the implementation of the management system, the company's order conversion rate has increased to 60%, and the revenue has increased by 150%. In the next step, Xuanxing Technology plans to expand to the intelligent manufacturing, finance and logistics industries.
Enterprise service angel wheel is still "volume"
The company is behind more than sequoia China. According to Tianyan, in late January this year, Xuanxing Technology underwent industrial and commercial changes, the registered capital increased from 7.84 million yuan to 8.65 million yuan, and the shareholders added Beijing Quantum Leap Technology Co., Ltd., holding 8% of the shares, and this company is the investment entity commonly used by ByteDance.
It is worth noting that the end of January is the time when the byte war investment department sent out the news of the layoffs.
Up to now, Xuanxing Technology has 6 shareholders, the largest shareholder is Wuhan Chaozhiyun Asset Investment Partnership under the name of CEO Hu Shichao, holding 29.53% of the shares, Hu Shichao and Zheng Zhixian both hold 22.15%, Sequoia China holds 15%, ByteDance holds 7.67%, and Tongwei Venture holds 3.5%.
Corporate services are a hot track, and it's not unusual to attract well-known institutions like Sequoia China and ByteDance at the same time. For Xuanxing Technology, the business processes of large enterprises are complex, and large companies such as Byte can integrate resources with them and carry out multi-scenario digital transformation attempts.
Last year, the investment industry reported on the phenomenon of "group buying angel wheel" - in some star projects that investors are competing for, angel wheels are settled in the form of group purchases, such as Yuanxiang Weisi, Datafuse Labs, motphys and other companies. Years later, the pace of the financing market has slowed down, but the most advanced institutions have obviously not stopped, and will still compete for the cake on star projects, and the competition for the investment share of corporate management targets is more intense. For example, Fangyun Intelligent announced an angel round of financing this month, the investors are Yingdong Capital and Cambrian Venture Capital, which is an AI research and development performance management platform; Huangli Intelligent announced a tens of millions of RMB angel round financing in February, led by Huixin Investment, shenzhen venture capital Southford, Yuanzheng Investment and investment, which is an intelligent noise reduction and voice technology company.
It is worth mentioning that after the news of the dissolution of the strategic investment department, Byte still did not give up the early investment. At the beginning of this year, there was news on the Internet that ByteDance's strategic investment department had been dissolved, and the members of the original department had other appointments. At that time, the relevant person in charge of ByteDance responded to the media, saying, "The company conducted an inventory and analysis of the business at the beginning of the year, decided to strengthen business focus, reduce investment with low synergy, disperse the employees of the strategic investment department into various business lines, and strengthen the cooperation between the strategic research function and the business." Planning discussions are also underway for the business and teams involved. ”
According to incomplete statistics, since 2014, ByteDance has disclosed more than 90 investment activities. Among them, enterprise services are the track of Byte's key layout, according to publicly disclosed information, in 2021, Byte's investment in the field of enterprise services has more than 10 cases.
Although Byte has also launched To B products and businesses such as Feishu in the past, the scale of this part and the revenue contributed to the enterprise cannot be compared with the C-end revenue, so enterprise services have also become the part that Byte hopes to make up through investment. In many investment cases, Byte will incorporate the investment team into its own system through mergers and acquisitions. For example, in July 2021, Byte invested in the A round of heipa cloud that mainly engages in the construction of enterprise application platforms without code, and this year, according to 36Kr, the company has been acquired by Byte, and founder Chen Jinzhou and some team members have joined Feishu. Earlier, the other two invested enterprise service companies, Cheng Hao, the founder of Chaoxi Calendar, and Wang Xu, CEO of Curtain, also joined Feishu to take charge of related businesses after the company was acquired by Byte.
Different from Byte's past investment in the field of enterprise services, Xuanxing Technology involves more complex business scenarios, which can further supplement Byte's territory in the To B field. (Text/Liu Yanqiu, Source/Touzhong Network)