Cloud-native DevOps platform “ezOne.work” completes a Series A round of financing of tens of millions of CNY from Blue Lake Capital

Recently, “ezOne.work”, a cloud-native DevOps platform, has completed a Series A round of financing of tens of millions of CNY from Blue Lake Capital. The proceeds from this round of financing will be mainly used for the continuous R&D of products and accelerated commercialization. Previously, “ezOne.work” secured multi-million CNY in the angel round of financing from Kingsoft Cloud, and secured tens of millions of CNY in the Pre-A round of financing from Shunwei Capital.

“ezOne.work” was established in 2019 by a team of business experts from Baidu, Huawei, IBM, Kingsoft Cloud, JD.com and other companies who have long been engaged in the field of enterprise-level R&D effectiveness. The team has long been focus on the improvement of R&D effectiveness as well as the R&D and application of R&D toolsets at top large-scale companies, which allows them to see the power that software engineering and toolsets bring to the world and the huge gap in software engineering and basic toolsets at home and abroad.

Therefore,  “ezOne.work” decided to establish a Chinese company specializing in enterprise-level R&D effectiveness to help enterprises achieve business success and show the world the power of software engineering tools developed in China by constantly exploring underlying technologies and continuously using technology and product innovation to promote the improvement of enterprise-level R&D effectiveness.

Since its establishment, “ezOne.work” has been awarded with widespread praise and honors in the industry: In 2020, it was appointed as a CAICT DevOps standard setting company; In 2021, it was appointed as a CAICT trusted cloud standard setting company; In 2022, it was appointed as a specialist company for the Cloud Software Engineering Community; It has successively received the certification of the AAA-level corporate credit rating, the certifications of ISO9001, ISO27001, and ISO20000, and the certificates of Zhongguancun High-tech Enterprise and Beijing Haidian District Germ Enterprise.

According to the latest survey of 1,049 enterprises conducted by the CAICT in the second quarter of 2022, the overall engineering capability of domestic R&D teams is weak, the level of their digitalized R&D synergy is low, and the adoption rate of software R&D tools isn’t high. In most cases, R&D teams are using overseas open source tools for integration, interface modification and packaging, and script concatenation, meaning that they have to invest valuable R&D resources and face high maintenance cost and the low tool-adoption efficiency of engineers. Commercialized DevOps platforms in the domestic market are mainly integrated based on overseas open source software. The current economic climate strongly requires constant efforts in further cost reduction, energy conservation and efficiency improvement as well as in self-developing and obtaining control over basic software. There is a strong demand for a true domestically-developed one-stop R&D synergy platform.

The products of “ezOne.work” are designed in accordance with the current situation, meaning they are all self-developed and can provide users with a true end-to-end one-stop DevOps platform. “ezOne.work” offers products covering project management, knowledge base management, document management, code hosting, code review, code scanning, code metrics, code search, distributed builds and pipeline systems, unified artifact management systems, host deployment systems, Kubernetes cluster management and deployment systems, test management platforms, R&D effectiveness measurement and process approval BPM.

The company’s products boast strong features and have obvious client perception. The features mainly include:

• Having a complete functional matrix: Cover the whole process of R&D in a real sense and enable a highly efficient digitalized synergy involving all R&D process.

• Making R&D data an entire whole: Enable extremely efficient procedures and the visualization, traceability, and auditability of the entire process of R&D management to get rid of fragmented data and complicated management caused by the integration of multiple tools and platforms. 

• Strong capability of providing technical support and meeting demands: Based on the company’s strong R&D capability, it can provide its clients with trustworthy technical services so that the clients will no longer be constrained by third party’s components. Meanwhile, it is also able to provide clients with long-term solutions upgraded with the growing functional demands from clients.

• Domestically developed, controllable, and conducive to the domestic innovation in information technology application (referred to as “Xinchuang”) : There’s no need for clients to have concerns that software R&D platforms would be blocked due to potential uncontrollable factors. In addition, last year, the company’s products were delivered to the Xinchuang lab of a state-owned large telecom company and it has become a fundamental platform for Xinchuang testing.

• Products are powerful and professional, suitable for enterprise scenarios: “ezOne.work” has a strong team of experts who have more than a decade of R&D experience and client servicing experience. Its products are designed to be more suitable for enterprises by being safer, more professional and more powerful compared to open source software that is more suitable for scenarios that are free and with no restrictions.

The company’s products are awarded with multiple core technology patents and ten-plus software copyrights. Since they were launched, they have won GOPS 2020 Star Product of the Year Awards, 2021 CAICT Cloud Native Technology Innovation Awards and CAICT Trusted Cloud Devices Tool Advanced Level Certification. Two client cases implemented by “ezOne.work”, the China Life Property & Casualty Insurance case and the TCL case, both won the Outstanding Case Award at the 2022 CAICT Software Engineering Conference.

Up to now, the “ezOne.work” SaaS version has thousands of corporate users while its private deployment version has medium and large sized clients from industries including insurance, banking, energy, Internet, cloud computing, AI, manufacturing, real estate, government, and scientific research institutions. “ezOne.work” also provides a free private deployment version for hundreds of small and micro sized enterprises.

Regarding this round of financing, Qing Liu, the founder of “ezOne.work”, said, “The field of engineering tools for basic software belongs to basic software, with high technical moats which need a long-term accumulation of domain knowledge to form. The company’s product matrix has been improved with years of precipitation and accumulation. The proceeds from this round of financing will be used for constant R&D investment to improve products’ core competitiveness, in turn accelerating their commercialization.”

Yifan Zhang, Blue Lake Capital’s Investment Director remarked, “In recent years, Blue Lake Capital has been seeking outstanding domestic technology enterprises, as investment opportunities in China lie in science and technology. Basic software tools for software engineering in the domestic market is expected to have a promising future, given that the development of these tools at home is weaker than that abroad. Looking forward, as technology evolves in China, enterprises that are more professional in providing basic software tools for software engineering will be desperately needed. As a tech company with strong R&D capability, ‘ezOne.work’ has shown its preliminary strong competitiveness benefited from its painstaking R&D accumulation. This allows the company acquired typical clients in industries by winning biddings in a row and allows it achieved the evident momentum of growth against the adverse environment. Blue Lake Capital is not only bullish on the long-term development of ‘ezOne.work’, it also hopes it can make contributions to China’s technology industry by investing in the company.”

Yixuan Geng, Executive Director of Shunwei Capital said, “As Chinese technology companies expand and technologies like cloud native evolve, the digitalized R&D synergy and management brings increasingly prominent demand for DevOps platforms. For the long term, Shunwei Capital is bullish on ‘ezOne.work’, a Chinese company specialized in this field and a leader in technology, and it is optimistic about the basic software industry in China. Shunwei Capital, the investor in the Chinese tech company’s Pre-A round of financing, believes ‘ezOne.work’ will enter a new development stage with the additional assistance of Blue Lake Capital,”

Kaiyan Tian, Partner and Vice President of Kingsoft Cloud noted, “‘ezOne.work’ has an outstanding team that leads in the domestic DevOps market in terms of technology and professionalism. As the angel investor of ‘ezOne.work’, Kingsoft Cloud believes in the rosy prospect of ‘ezOne.work’ and supports its development. Additionally, it forms a close strategic partnership with the company in many projects. The cooperation between Kingsoft Cloud and ‘ezOne.work’ is more than providing their common clients with more professional service, more complete solutions and higher client value. Kingsoft Cloud’s entire R&D system has been significantly improved in R&D synergy efficiency and R&D management by comprehensively applying the ‘ezOne.work’ platform.”