BEIJING (AP) — Nils Pihl has spent 18 months building what he calls cutting-edge software to crunch “really big data sets.” But instead of going to Silicon Valley, the 27-year-old Swede and his four colleagues have been working on his invention from a small apartment overlooking smoggy northwest Beijing.

In typical startup fashion, they’ve raised hundreds of thousands of dollars after countless pitch meetings and were racing to prepare their product for launch. Their investors are in Beijing as well as the U.S.