3 Cloud Database Startups to Watch

November 8, 2021

Hello readers! Before I get to the news, a career update: I'm happy to announce that I have joined Acceleration Economy as SVP, Editorial Director & Senior Analyst. It's a great opportunity to do what I love — write about data, work with a talented team of editors and analysts, and continue the Cloud Database Report in all of its forms, including this newsletter. You can find all of my work on Acceleration Economy's new Data Revolution channel here. 

Follow the money...

A recurring theme in my coverage of the cloud database market has been to follow the money. Venture funding is pouring into startups, always an indicator of the innovation pipeline. Among the announcements we've seen this year, Databricks has brought in $1.6 billion; Neo4j, $325 million; Firebolt, $127 million; and Redis, $110 million. 

The list keeps growing. Three more startups have disclosed funding rounds in recent days. 

Yugabyte - $188 Million

In a blog post, CEO Bill Cook revealed that Yugabyte had closed $188 million in Series C funding. This comes just seven months after an earlier round, bringing total funding to more than $290 million and a unicorn valuation of $1.3 billion. Yugabyte is seeing "massive demand" for its PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database, Cook said. 

Yugabyte CTO Karthik Ranganathan was a recent guest on our podcast. 

• Listen to the Podcast: Yugabyte - Where Data Lives Forever

QuestDB - $12 Million

QuestDB describes its relational, column-oriented database as the fastest open source time-series database. The company disclosed its Series A round of $12 million on the same day that Yellowbrick announced its funding. In one notable example of an early adopter, Airbus is using QuestDB for real-time applications involving hundreds of millions of data points per day. 

These three examples illustrate the breadth of development underway in the cloud DB market — a high-performance data warehouse, a distributed database, and an open source time-series database. One other tidbit: TileDB recently shared that Lockheed Martin Ventures and NTT Docomo Ventures have become investors. 

• Listen to the Podcast: TileDB CEO Stavros Papadopoulos

Thanks for starting your week with the Cloud Database Report! 

John Foley, Editor