Oray Information Technology Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Oray), a leading SaaS company in China focusing on remote connectivity solutions, has completed a new series of financing of USD 40 million within six months after its successful financing in July last year. This series was led by GL Ventures, followed by Tencent; Gaocheng Capital, the existing shareholder, has increased its shares. This series of financing will be used for the recruitment of top talents, core technology R&D and expanding of overseas market.
Founded in 2006, Oray was established with a mission “Connectivity Everywhere”, with a vision of connectivity among people, devices and networks for small and medium-sized businesses. Based on business models of SNP (SaaS, NaaS, PaaS), Oray has created a mature product shelf consisting of Sunflower (remote control), Peanut Shell (remote access) and Dandelion (off-site networking) to achieve connectivity for enterprises and individual users.
Jing Hong, Founding Partner of Gaocheng Capital, said: “Oray has achieved ultra-fast growth with great quality in the past year, continuously optimizing its products, expanding its customer base, and improving organizational efficiency and management. In the IoT era, “going cloud”has been the major trend for businesses; employees are located in different places, so remote collaboration is a must. As a flagship company in the industry, Oray has experienced the resource gathering effect. In the future, we will work together with GL Ventures and Tencent to scale up our support to Oray and help the management deploy the best strategy to create core value for customers”.
Building a new ecosystem of smart connectivity with the SNP model
Chen Yuye, founder and CEO of Oray, predicts that the IoT-based SNP model will be the next commanding height for the industry, and Oray’s product pipelines are closely integrated with SNP.
How is the SNP model closely aligned with Oray’s three products?
· SaaS refers to our Peanut Shell and Sunflower pipelines that provide software services to customers on a yearly fee basis. Oray provides domain-based solutions for remote access to intranet data and remote control of IoT device desktops.
· NaaS refers to Network as a Service, and our Dandelion is a typical product pipeline of this kind, providing customers with cloud network solutions based on a self-defined combination. For example, Dandelion’s remote video surveillance combines hardware and software through off-site networking to create a close-loop system that enables multi-point remote transmission and centralized management, and is easy to deploy and requires no manual maintenance.
· PaaS is our focus in the future. PaaS is a typical example in the era of the API economy, and our hero PaaS product is the enterprise-level solution provided by our Sunflower product line. The deployment is mainly through licensing the SDK/API to third-party partners, helping partners create products that fit their own industry characteristics and needs with Oray’s technical expertise in the field of remote control, so as to create reliable remote connectivity solutions. This new series of financing is for Oray to continue to develop in this direction.
Enhancing 2B business and cracking open international markets
Oray’s strategic thinking behind this series of financing is to improve its 2B business and also to “go global”, cracking open the international market.
In recent years, leading overseas SaaS companies such as Shopify and Bill.com, which have empowered SMB customers, are relying on strong network effects to continuously penetrate upwards and open up new markets, well received by all parties. Oray is also focusing on SMEs as its main customer base and has already won over key customers in various industries with its great products. Oray will target more KA customers in the future. In 2020, Oray has experienced rapid revenue growth, with significant increase in renewal rates and much higher ratio of large enterprises customers, at the same level compared with leading overseas SaaS companies.
To serve KA customers, it is inevitable to provide tailor-made solutions. In this regard, Chen Yuye said that as Oray provides services at the remote connection layer rather than the application layer, it is a light system service. At this level, the needs of different KAs are more or less the same, so with the accumulation and repetition of industry best practices, Oray has been able to effectively cut the cost of customization for KA customers and achieve high flexibility and replicability. Through this iterative model, Oray has gained a number of industry solutions in real estate, retail, medical and industrial sectors, well received by customers.
On top of that, Oray started to expand its international market from Q4 2019 and launched AweSun, the overseas edition of Sunflower, with an installed base of 2 million units overseas in about a year’s time. As of now, Oray has deployed servers in Asia, North America, Europe and South America, with a fledgling overseas market layout. Chen Yuye admits that Oray’s overseas market is still in the initial stage, but the company has already found the suitable strategy to do this. It is expected to achieve an installed base of 10 million units in the overseas market in 2021.
Remote connectivity: a “must” for enterprises in the Internet and IoT era
With economic transformation and upgrade, coupled with the pandemic, remote connectivity has become a “must” for Chinese enterprises to increase their competitiveness. Enterprises need remote connectivity for scaling up, business expansion, efficiency improvement, collaboration among different business units and information security; they are also focusing more and more on remote working and various interaction solutions. In the post-pandemic era, businesses have already embarked on the irreversible journey of digital transition.
With “connectivity” and “management” as its core concepts, remote connectivity technology breaks the boundaries of space and has an array of application scenarios. It can provide diverse connectivity services to individual users, making their daily lives more digital; it can also create true economic value for business users, enabling them to optimize processes, cut labor costs, shorten response time, enhance product and service quality, and achieve internal and external connectivity and collaboration.
Chen Yuye believes that the development of Oray is closely related to three trends listed in the Gartner report “Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2021: Distributed cloud, Anywhere operations and Cybersecurity mesh.”
Distributed cloud has different forms, among which the Internet of Things (IoT) edge cloud is pivotal, and Oray’s Dandelion product line has achieved great results in the IoT field through a combination of software and hardware.
“Anywhere Operations” is also closely related to Oray, where Oray provides connectivity among people, devices and networks. The Sunflower Remote Control product line has greatly empowered businesses and individuals in terms of collaboration and productivity.
Finally, in cybersecurity, the impact of the pandemic has accelerated the process of digital transformation for enterprises. Most enterprises are well aware of cybersecurity. Oray has been at the forefront of cybersecurity as a solution provider of SaaS remote connectivity.
An advocate of global connectivity in the new infrastructure era
In the new infrastructure era based on 5G+Cloud+IoT, remote collaboration is well placed to connect more people, businesses and devices. There is no doubt that Oray has already become an important player in this field. As the pandemic continues, remote control industry is bound to experience rapid development worldwide. Oray’s leading position in technology and successful exploration of business models will surely drive its development.
