Yugabyte Raises $16M to Expand Reach to Large Enterprises

I am excited to announce that Yugabyte has raised $16M in additional funding in a round led by Dell Technologies Capital and our previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners. Combined with our previous funding of $8M, YugaByte has now raised $24M to solve one of the most challenging problems in operational databases today — a cloud-native, high-performance distributed SQL database platform.

YugabyteDB, which hit the 1.0 GA milestone last month, makes it possible for organizations to standardize on a single, open-source high-performance database for a multitude of workloads requiring distributed SQL capabilities and deployed in multi-cloud/hybrid cloud environments. The end result is unmatched application development agility along with significant reduction in operational complexity, hosting, and licensing costs.

With the additional funding, we will accelerate investments in engineering, sales, and customer success to scale our support for enterprises building business-critical applications in the cloud.

Our New Investor: Dell Technologies Capital

Dell Technologies Capital, which came out of stealth last year, has been an active investor in nearly 90 early-stage startups since 2012 with 37 successful exits, including 3 unicorn IPOs within the past nine months. We are pleased to welcome Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, to our board. He’ll be joining Ravi Mhatre, Founder & Managing Director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, on the board. We are truly grateful for the continued support from Ravi & Lightspeed and for being with us from the very beginning.

“In today’s multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud world, applications are becoming portable but databases are not. Fortune 500 CIOs are starting to re-platform the data layer for scalability, developer friendliness and cloud-neutrality. YugaByte is helping democratize the transactional database layer by offering a single non-proprietary database that can span public and private clouds. YugaByte’s value proposition is strong for both CIOs, who can avoid cloud vendor lock-in at the database layer, and for developers, who don’t have to re-architect existing applications because of YugaByte’s built-in native compatibility to popular NoSQL and SQL interfaces.”   — Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director, Dell Technologies Capital

Distributed SQL FTW!

Business-critical applications are increasingly being deployed onto cloud native microservice architectures running on Docker and Kubernetes. (We are at DockerCon this week!) As a result, enterprises are requiring the underlying data tier to also offer capabilities that can prove incredibly challenging for traditional databases to support.

“YugaByte is going to be interesting to any enterprise requiring an elastic data tier for their cloud native applications. Even more so if they have a requirement to operate across multiple clouds or in a Kubernetes environment. By combining NoSQL and SQL API compatibility within a single cloud native database, an organization’s developers become more productive, while operators benefit from the reduced complexity.”   — Ian Andrews, VP Products, Pivotal

For example, many organizations rely on SQL databases like Oracle and PostgreSQL for their ACID compliant systems of record. However, unlike monolithic SQL databases, YugabyteDB offers the ability to horizontally scale nodes globally, across regions, while remaining fully ACID compliant. YugabyteDB also delivers linear write/read scalability, plus auto-rebalancing, sharding and fault tolerance. These features often prove to be very costly or difficult to implement in traditional SQL databases.

Organizations also end up relying on NoSQL databases like AWS DynamoDB, Azure Cosmos DB, Apache Cassandra and MongoDB for workloads requiring elasticity, super fast write performance, and flexible schemas — features which traditional SQL databases lack. However, this fragmented, NoSQL + SQL approach increases operational complexity, hosting and software licensing costs, plus hinders developer and business agility.

YugabyteDB delivers all the features you’d expect from a NoSQL database, plus high performance ACID transactions, and elastic global data distribution across both public and private clouds. YugabyteDB enables organizations to standardize on a single database without having to compromise on speed, consistency or scale.

YugabyteDB offers the semi-relational YugaByte Cloud Query Language (YCQL) API, along with beta support for the fully-relational, PostgreSQL-compatible YSQL API — both powered by a common underlying storage and replication engine.

History and Milestones

Today’s announcement is the latest milestone in YugaByte’s journey that started in February 2016 when Karthik, Mikhail and I (Kannan) founded the company.

We had certainly undertaken an ambitious and technically challenging task — that of building a high-performance open source distributed SQL database and is also capable of running on any cloud or container infrastructure. However, having had the benefit of working in the guts of Oracle’s RDBMS for over a decade and later leading the NoSQL efforts at Facebook it was clear to me (and my co-founders) that, while challenging, this was indeed tractable. We were also confident in the need for such a transformative technology from our days working as the engineers who led the massive scaling of Facebook’s multi-petabyte NoSQL platform (which powers Facebook Messenger and Facebook’s internal time series monitoring system).

Powering Business-Critical Apps at Enterprises

YugabyteDB 1.0 is already enabling organizations to realize the advantages of combining SQL and NoSQL in a single database. For instance, YugabyteDB powers the Location Tracking Service at Turvo, a real-time collaborative logistics platform.

“We are revolutionizing logistics with a collaborative, connected IoT platform to create the Internet of Shipping. This requires a 100 percent reliable transactional database that is capable of near-infinite scaling and can serve large datasets at very low latencies. YugabyteDB is that database for us.” — Sai Nagboth, CTO, Turvo

Join Us In Our Journey

Great companies are built by great people. If doing the best work of your career excites you, then apply for the open positions we are looking to hire immediately. You will also start believing in the wise saying “Come for the work, stay for the awesome.” 😄

What’s Next?

• See how YugabyteDB compares against other NoSQL and SQL databases
• Get started! Download and install a cluster, plus get a sample app up in running in just a few minutes.