Xata, a Female-Led Database Startup, Aims for Extreme Usability

The goal is a database that is technically sophisticated but easy for business users to build upon

John Foley Mar 24

What if a database was not just easy for the average business person to use, but actually a pleasure to work with?

That is the idealistic goal of Monica Sarbu, the founder and CEO of Xata, a startup that is building a database that, if all goes as planned, will be so intuitive that even non-technical users will be able to develop applications with it.

“The experience with databases has been hard and painful,” Sarbu explained in our recent conversation. “We want to change that.”

Xata’s big idea — extreme usability — is deserving of our attention on its own, but there’s more to the story. The company’s board of directors is comprised entirely of women. That makes it one of the only — if not the only — tech startups with 100% female leadership at the board level.

In this blog post, I will try to connect the dots and show why we will likely be hearing more about Xata.

The Back Story

Earlier this month, Xata announced that it has secured $30 million in Series A funding, led by Redpoint and Index Ventures.

That’s how the all-women board came to be. In addition to Sarbu, the other two board members are Erica Brescia of Redpoint, who is serving as director of the board, and Erin Price-Wright of Index Ventures, a board observer.

They all have impressive backgrounds in the tech industry. Sarbu cofounded Packetbeat, an open-source monitoring system that was acquired by Elastic in 2015, and she was director of engineering with Elastic for five years.

Sarbu got the idea for Xata working with Airtable, a popular SaaS application that is sometimes described as a hybrid database-spreadsheet platform. However, in Sarbu’s experience, Airtable did not have the level of database capabilities that she needed.

“We found Airtable to be rather limited in the amount of data we could store, as well as lacking more developer-centric functionality like transactions and constraints,” she wrote in a blog post on the funding.

Sarbu launched Xata to create a more capable database and one that is on par with Airtable in terms of ease of use. Xata says its database “feels like a spreadsheet.”

Here is the link to Xata’s website.

The end game is to simplify database development in such a way that organizations won’t need all of the deep technical skills that are typically required for database management.

“From what I’ve seen,” says Sarbu, “companies spend 90% of their time on the infrastructure work, and not so much on the products they are building.”

Advancing Diversity in Tech

Prior to launching Xata, Sarbu cofounded Tupu, a nonprofit whose mission is to mentor women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups in the tech industry.

That’s significant because it was during the Tupu project that Sarbu had the “aha” moment about the need for a database that has the technical underpinnings that developers care about — storage, search, analytics, etc. — but which does not require a computer scientist to deploy and operate.

“I realized that there is a huge opportunity in the market for a database that is easy to use,” says Sarbu.

Tupu became a proving ground for Xata’s technology. “For us, it’s really important to use a product in production in order to make it a better user experience.”

And while Tupu is not the focus of this article, I will say that the nonprofit serves a vital mission in helping women and other underrepresented people advance and succeed in tech. Tupu is open to both mentors and mentees, so check it out and help spread the word.

Here is the link to Tupu’s website.

What Is Xata?

I asked Sarbu what kind of database Xata is. Her answer was indirect.

“We are building the platform so that you don’t have to know in advance what kind of database you need to use,” she says. “We don’t want to be database specific; we want to be use-case specific.”

That may help diffuse the SQL vs. NoSQL debate for some. But technologists will want more details, so here you go:

• Xata is a serverless database, so scaling happens automatically

• It supports ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) transactions, which are often a requirement for enterprise environments

• Xata is complementary to Jamstack (Javascript, APIs, and markup) for web development

• Xata’s database-as-a-service is in closed beta, with wider availability planned for this year. It will include a free tier and paid tiers for scaling up

• There are (or will be) integrations with Vercel (front-end development), Netlify (Jamstack web development workflow and automation), and Cloudflare (network as a service)

A Citizen Database

Xata seems to fit into the growing trend of citizen technologists — people who may not be professional developers but who have enough digital skills to build what they need.

There are already citizen developers and citizen data scientists. Say hello to citizen DBAs.

Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel, and an investor in Xata, put it this way: “When I started Vercel and Node.js, I dreamt of a data layer that’d be friendly for devs and non-devs alike. It’s finally here.”

That said, there’s no escaping the fact that database deployment has been and continues to be a process in which some degree of technical support is helpful if not essential.

“Our audience is developers. We put a lot of work into making a better developer experience,” says Sarbu. “But you don’t have to be a developer, or understand how a database works, in order to use and manage one in production.”

My assessment: Xata does not eliminate the need for technical talent or support in database management, but it may lower the stress and demands on tech teams that are stretched thin trying to keep up.

If Xata can provide a database as a service that has the tools developers want (i.e. Jamstack), the enterprise capabilities that businesses require (i.e. ACID transactions), and the ease-of-use for citizen-driven applications (i.e. UX), the company’s platform has a good chance of success.