ZetYun is a Beijing, China-based startup offering data mining and analytics services to Chinese enterprises. It was founded as recently as in the past February by two Microsoft alumni who went back to their home country last year reckoning itโs the right time to build a business for enterprise-facing data analytics in China.
Currently what ZetYun is developing include an Alpine-like service on predictive analytics for big data. It partners with local business-facing service providers like Ntalker, a CRM solution provider, on predictive modeling. A model then can be adopted by Ntalkerโs clients including a Chinese telecom operator. And the performance of the model will be improved based on data from individual clients.
The 2010-founded, San Francisco-based Alpine Data Labs, actually tried entering China market. In 2011 the company declared that theyโd โaggressively expandโ in the U.S. and China when announcing $7.5 million Series A funding. Two of the co-founders, then CEO and CTO, were Chinese and โhad strong ties to Chinaโ. Alpine landed in China in April 2012 with a high-profile press conference (report in Chinese). But one year later, obviously the current CEO of the company isnโt a Chinese and no online presence for the company can be found on the Chinese-language Web now.
We cannot tell Alpineโs apparent failure in China has more to do with the change of the companyโs strategy or the less mature China market for predictive analysis. ZetYun founders think predictive analysis now is still at an early stage in China, but believe it will grow faster than it does in developed markets like North America and eventually be a big market.
Alpine raised $16 million in Series B last month. Venture capital in China is chasing after enterprise-facing services, too. Baifendian, a big data-based recommendation solution provider, raised some $10 million in Series B in July 2013; Facishare, after pivoting from becoming Chinaโs Yammer to Chinaโs Salesforce, raised funding from IDG Capital Partners. Commenting on the investment in Facishare, Niu Kuiguang, vice president at IDG Capital Partners, said that enterprise-facing market in China would take off in the near future. Reasons include that emerging businesses like e-commerce services have been used to SaaS.
Another service ZetYun offers is like the Y Combinator-backed Swiftype, a website search engine builder who also provides analytics on user search behavior. ZetYun started up with some seed funding and plans to raise a Series A round next year.
