Business
Cockroach Labs announces $55M Series C to battle industry giants
Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, sits in a tough position in the database market. On one side, it has traditional database vendors like Oracle, and on the other there’s AWS and its family of databases. It takes some good technology and serious dollars to compete with those companies. Cockroach took care of the latter with a $55 million Series C round today.
The round was led by Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global along with existing investor GV. Other existing investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Work-Bench also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $110 million, according to the company.
Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO, says the company is building a modern database to compete with these industry giants. “CockroachDB is architected from the ground up as a cloud native database. Fundamentally, what that means is that it’s distributed, not just across nodes in a single data center, which is really table stakes as the database gets bigger, but also across data centers to be resilient. It’s also distributed potentially across the planet in order to give a global customer base what feels like a local experience to keep the data near them,” Kimball explained.
At the same time, even while it has a cloud product hosted on AWS, it also competes with several AWS database products including Amazon Aurora, Redshift and DynamoDB. Much like MongoDB, which changed its open source licensing structure last year, Cockroach did as well, for many of the same reasons. They both believed bigger players were taking advantage of the open source nature of their products to undermine their markets.
“If you’re trying to build a business around an open source product, you have to be careful that a much bigger player doesn’t come along and extract too much of the value out of the open source product that you’ve been building and maintaining,” Kimball explained.
As the company deals with all of these competitive pressures, it takes a fair bit of money to continue building a piece of technology to beat the competition, while going up against much deeper-pocketed rivals. So far the company has been doing well with Q1 revenue this year doubling all of last year. Kimball indicated that Q2 could double Q1, but he wants to keep that going, and that takes money.
“We need to accelerate that sales momentum and that’s usually what the Series C is about. Fundamentally, we have, I think, the most advanced capabilities in the market right now. Certainly we do if you look at the differentiator around just global capability. We nevertheless are competing with Oracle on one side, and Amazon on the other side. So a lot of this money is going towards product development too,” he said.
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015, and is based in New York City.
-
Business7 days ago
Lordstown Motors’ ousted CEO settles with SEC for misleading investors
-
Business6 days ago
Apple sued, Microsoft’s AI ambitions and Nvidia’s surprises
-
Business5 days ago
TechCrunch Mobility: The wheels are starting to come off the Fisker EV bus
-
Entertainment4 days ago
Amazon Big Spring Sale 2024: Shop 350+ deals on Apple, robot vacuums, security cameras, more
-
Business4 days ago
Maju Kuruvilla is out as CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt
-
Entertainment3 days ago
Where’s the AI in these ‘AI-powered’ products for your home?
-
Entertainment4 days ago
Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (2024): The MacBook Pro of gaming laptops
-
Entertainment6 days ago
Amazon’s Big Spring Sale 2024: Shop 340+ deals on Apple, robot vacuums, security cameras, more