The race is on in the cloud database market as fast-moving startups address an urgent need among businesses for new and better ways to capitalize on all of their data.
Cockroach Labs today becomes the latest cloud database startup to accelerate product development and market expansion with $278 million in Series F funding, bringing its total funding to $633 million and raising its market valuation to $5 billion.
In making the announcement, CEO and cofounder Spencer Kimball pointed to a growing need among businesses to build more complex, data-driven applications using cloud services. “CockroachDB was purpose-built for this new world,” he said.
Cockroach Labs—which has tripled its annual recurring revenue in the last year—plans to use the funding for the development of its distributed SQL cloud database, customer growth, and expansion into new markets.
The capital influx represents a capstone in what has been a busy year of investments in cloud database companies, as well as the growing ecosystem of specialists—such as Carto (with $61 million in just-announced Series C funding) and Matillion ($150 million in Series E)—that have a role in emerging “cloud database platforms,” where partner technologies add value on top of the database itself.
There’s a data gold rush underway as businesses seek to leverage their valuable data stores to drive innovation and new revenue opportunities. IDC forecasts the overall database market will grow to $104.5 billion by 2025.
Databricks, with its “lakehouse” data and AI architecture, may have set the bar in August with a Series H investment round of $1.6 billion that raised the company’s valuation to $38 billion. Bloomberg recently referred to Databricks as a “$38 billion startup.”
Cloud database investment rounds in 2021 include:
- Databricks, $1.6 billion, Series H — lakehouse data and AI
- Neo4j, $325 millon, Series F — graph database and AuraDB cloud service
- Cockroach Labs, $278 million, Series F — open-source distributed SQL cloud database
- Yugabyte, $188 million, Series C — open-source distributed SQL cloud database
- Firebolt, $127 million, Series B — “world’s fastest” cloud data warehouse
- Redis, $110 million, Series G – real-time data platform
- SingleStore, $80 million, Series F — “single database” for diverse workloads
- PlanetScale, $30 million, Series B, and $50 million, Series C — MySQL-compatible serverless database
- Yellowbrick Data, $75 million, Series C1 — high-performance data warehouse
- ArangoDB, $27.8 million, Series B — “graph and beyond” cloud database
That adds up to nearly $2.9 billion in database funding in 2021, and that list is not all-inclusive. In addition to those later-stage investment rounds, new cloud database vendors are springing up. In January 2021, Pinecone Systems, developer of a vector database, emerged from stealth mode with $10 million in funding. Others include Memgraph ($9 million) and Nebula Graph ($8 million), both of which are developers of graph databases.
It’s also interesting to follow the money to see who’s getting a front seat for these emerging systems. In June, GV (Google Ventures) joined Neo4j’s funding round. And in September, TileDB disclosed that it had received strategic investments from Lockheed Martin Ventures and NTT Docomo Ventures for its multi-dimensional array “universal database.”
The end game for many of these emerging companies may be IPOs or acquisitions by larger companies. In July, Couchbase raised $200 million in an initial public offering.
CockroachDB Options and Customers
Within this fray, Cockroach Labs continues to expand its platform and cloud service offerings. The company’s database is available in four flavors:
- CockroachDB Dedicated — fully managed, reserved database cluster
- CockroachDB Serverless (beta) — fully managed, autonomous database cluster
- CockroachDB Self-Hosted — self-managed database in cloud of choice
- CockroachDB Core — downloadable open-source database
Cockroach Labs has introduced several new capabilities in recent months, including its CockroachDB 21.2 release and the serverless version of its cloud database, which includes an entry-level free tier.
More than half of Cockroach Labs’ customers now run their apps on its fully managed cloud service. Customers include Comcast, Devsisters, eBay, Nubank, Norfolk Southern, Starburst Data, AllSaints, Bose, and Form3.
Mythical Games, which has developed a blockchain-based platform that enables video game players to own virtual assets, is a CockroachDB user. Chris Downs, Co-founder and Director of Site Reliability Engineering for Mythical Games, said Cockroach Labs’ “zero downtime” upgrades, multi-region configuration, and technical support help the gaming company keep data “close to the players” while being highly available and able to scale transparently.
Playing off its 300-million-year-old insect namesake, Cockroach Labs describes its software as “the world’s most evolved” cloud SQL database. In the cloud database market, constant evolution has become a requirement for everyone.
