Zenlayer Inks $30M Series B

Zenlayer, an edge cloud services provider, has grown exponentially since its founding in 2014. The company now boasts over 120 PoPs worldwide and 8.3 Tbps of capacity across its global backbone. Investors are recognizing that success with another round of funding, this time totaling $30 million. The majority of these funds will be used to expand globally with an emphasis on emerging markets like India, Indonesia, and Brazil and to further research and development in Zenlayer's bare metal cloud, cloud networking, and SD-WAN products.

The Series B round was led by Forebright Capital and included both new investors and investors who had also participated in Zenlayer's Series A funding. Prominent among these are Volcanics Venture, a technology-focused fund; and F&G Venture, a fund focused on companies in IT industries.

"This is an opportunity to really help our clients and partners improve their users' experiences," said Joe Zhu, CEO and Founder of Zenlayer. "To that end, we've set a very ambitious goal for ourselves. We currently reach about 80% of the world's users within 25 milliseconds. We want to get that number down to just 10 milliseconds." Low latency is particularly important for industries like gaming, video streaming, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Achieving that low-latency goal will require a combination of expanding Zenlayer's global infrastructure and innovative research in areas such as edge computing. Towards that end, Zenlayer has expanded its bare metal cloud capacity by 110% since the beginning of the year and recently opened a new office devoted to research and development in Hangzhou.

Forebright will provide support as Zenlayer further expands in emerging markets. "Zenlayer has already proven itself successful with its networking products," said Henry Liu, Co-founder of Forebright. "With additional funding, I expect them to grow faster than ever." He was specifically impressed with recent deployments in India which resulted in Zenlayer becoming one of the top companies delivering content in the country. "I look forward to seeing their results with the resources we provide."

Regarding research, one area which Zenlayer will aggressively be pursuing is intent-based networking, which was particularly appealing to Chenhui Wang, VP of Volcanics Venture. "Volcanics prides ourselves on funding companies we expect to succeed in the intelligent solutions space. We see intent-based networking as having a huge impact once it becomes feasible at scale. Using AI to create desired network states with algorithms will result in exponential efficiencies. We're excited to support Zenlayer in creating an even faster, more reliable network."

This round of funding also deepens the already-strong relationship between Zenlayer and F&G Venture. "We are pleased to reaffirm our support for Zenlayer," said Kevin Hui, Investment Director at F&G Venture. "It has been a pleasure to work with a company so committed to delivering for its customers. F&G Venture continues to be optimistic about the trend of Chinese internet companies going global, and Zenlayer is clearly the best choice to help them globalize their business."

About Zenlayer
Zenlayer (http://www.zenlayer.com) is an edge cloud services provider and is headquartered in Los Angeles and Shanghai with offices in Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shenzhen. Businesses utilize Zenlayer's software-defined platform to instantly enable worldwide connectivity and deliver superior user experience. Zenlayer offers on-demand bare metal cloud, cloud networking, SD-WAN, and managed services in more than 120 data centers on six continents.

About Forebright Capital
Forebright Private Equity Team (http://www.forebrightcapital.com) was established in 2001 as a department of China Everbright Limited (China Everbright). The team spun off from China Everbright and established Forebright Capital in 2014. Forebright is a differentiated institutional-quality fund manager investing in Chinese middle market growth private equity. It is committed to partnering with business leaders, providing value added services, and contributing to the long-term growth of outstanding enterprises in China.

About Volcanics Venture
Volcanics Ventures (http://www.volcanics.com) is committed to identifying, investing in, and serving the most promising companies and outstanding entrepreneurs in internet innovation, intelligent technology, and healthcare industries. Volcanics Venture brings a powerful combination of global perspective and local experience to investment management, striving to provide sustainable value-added services to portfolio companies and bring superior returns to limited partners.

About F&G Venture
F&G Venture (http://www.fgventure.com/en/index.jsp) is a venture capital fund focused on companies with exponential growth in IT industries, such as IT infrastructure, cloud computing, IoT, SaaS, big data, etc. It also targets high-end manufacturing businesses, including intelligence devices, robots and drones.