PingCAP
 | This article has been nominated for merging into TiDB. You are welcome to participate in the merging discussion, which will decide whether to merge it into TiDB. This discussion may also result in the article being deleted, redirected, or draftified. |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Enterprise software |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founders | Max Liu, Dongxu Huang, Qiu Cui |
| Headquarters | , United States |
| Key people | Max Liu (co-founder and CEO) Dongxu Huang (co-founder and CTO) |
| Products | TiDB, TiKV, TiDB Cloud |
Number of employees | c. 500 (2026) |
| Website | www |
PingCAP is an enterprise software company that develops TiDB, an open-source distributed SQL database, and TiKV, its underlying distributed key-value storage engine. Founded in Beijing in 2015, the company later established its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and also has offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo.[1][2]
History
[edit]PingCAP was founded in Beijing in 2015 by Max Liu, Dongxu Huang, and Qiu Cui, who had previously worked together on Redis infrastructure at the Chinese internet company Wandou Labs.[1] The founders had earlier collaborated on Codis, an open-source clustering solution for Redis.[3]
The company released the first general availability version of TiDB in October 2017.[4] TiDB's storage layer, TiKV, was accepted into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as a sandbox project in August 2018,[5] moved to incubation in May 2019,[6] and graduated in September 2020.[7]
In 2020, engineers from PingCAP published "TiDB: A Raft-based HTAP Database" at the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), describing the system's approach to combining transactional and analytical processing on a single data set.[8]
PingCAP announced TiDB Cloud, a managed service offering of TiDB, in beta in June 2020.[9] In October 2025, the company announced TiDB X, a revised architecture that uses cloud object storage as the primary persistence layer and separates compute from storage.[10]
Products
[edit]PingCAP's principal product is TiDB, a MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database released under the Apache 2.0 license. TiDB supports hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP) workloads using two storage engines: TiKV, a row-oriented store, and TiFlash, a column-oriented store.[11] TiDB also provides a vector data type and vector indexing, allowing it to be used for retrieval-augmented generation applications.[12]
The company offers TiDB Cloud, a managed service available on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Alibaba Cloud in addition to self-managed distributions.[13]
Funding
[edit]PingCAP raised a $15 million Series B round in 2017 led by China Growth Capital, with participation from Matrix Partners China, Yunqi Partners, FreeS Fund, and K2VC,[1] and a $50 million Series C round in 2018.[14] In November 2020 the company announced a $270 million Series D round jointly led by GGV Capital, Access Technology Ventures, Anatole Investment, Jeneration Capital, and 5Y Capital, bringing total funding to approximately $342 million.[9][15][16] In July 2021, PingCAP raised an additional undisclosed amount from investors including GIC, Sequoia Capital China, and Future Capital, at a reported valuation of $3 billion.[14]
Open source
[edit]TiDB and TiKV are both developed publicly on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.[17] TiKV is a graduated project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.[7]
References
[edit]- 1 2 3 "Chinese Software Startup PingCAP Raises $15M in Series B" (Press release). PR Newswire. 2017-06-20. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "About PingCAP". PingCAP. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ Hall, Susan (2017-04-17). "TiDB Brings Distributed Scalability to SQL". The New Stack. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "TiDB 1.0 release notes". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ Evans, Kristen (2018-08-28). "CNCF to Host TiKV in the Sandbox". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "TOC Votes to Move TiKV into CNCF Incubator". Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 2019-05-21. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- 1 2 "Celebrating TiKV's CNCF Graduation". TiKV. 2020-09-02. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ Huang, Dongxu; et al. (2020). "TiDB: A Raft-based HTAP Database". Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. 13 (12).
- 1 2 "Open-Source Company PingCAP Announces $270 Million Series D Funding" (Press release). PR Newswire. 2020-11-17. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "TiDB X Architecture". PingCAP. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ Xu, Kevin (2018-10-17). "How TiDB combines OLTP and OLAP in a distributed database". InfoWorld. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "TiDB Vector Search". PingCAP. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "TiDB Cloud release notes". PingCAP. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- 1 2 "PingCap powers through to $3bn valuation". Global Corporate Venturing. 2021-07-21. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ Lunden, Ingrid (2020-11-16). "PingCAP, the open-source developer behind TiDB, closes $270 million Series D". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "US-based enterprise software firm PingCap nets $270m in Series D round". DealStreetAsia. 2020-11-17. Retrieved 2026-08-12.
- ↑ "pingcap/tidb". GitHub. Retrieved 2026-08-12.