Cockroach Labs Raises $86 Million To Speed Development Of Its Distributed Database Software

Company sees the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and work-from-home demands as accelerating demand for distributed, cloud-native IT.

Cockroach Labs, developer of enterprise-class distributed SQL database software, has raised $86.6 million in a new round of financing, bringing the New York-based company’s total financing to $195.1 million.

Cockroach Labs raised the money in a Series D round of funding led by Altimeter Capital and BOND, with participation from Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Capital.

The round comes less than a year after the company raised $55 million in a Series C round in August 2019.

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Cockroach Labs, founded in 2015, has been gaining attention with its CockroachDB relational database system that’s designed to support next-generation, cloud-native transactional applications. In October the startup launched CockroachCloud, a fully-managed distributed edition of its database.

The company plans to apply the additional funding to its ongoing research and development operations. In a statement announcing the financing Cockroach Labs noted that the shift to work-from-home, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has put “increasing stress on the modern tech stack” in communications, gaming and entertainment, ecommerce and financial service industries with the need to support increased consumer demand and remote workforces.

“Economic uncertainty is encouraging greater efficiency, setting the stage for further migration away from legacy, closed-source data platforms to modern, distributed, cloud-native tools,” the company said. “This round of funding will facilitate Cockroach Labs’ growing investments in R&D to better support customers as they change to meet these new requirements.”

Cockroach Labs was co-founded by CEO Spencer Kimball who previously held engineering jobs at Google and Square and was CTO at Viewfinder and WeGo Systems.

“The migration to a multi-cloud environment has long been underway at many, if not all, of the top global enterprises,” Kimball said in a statement. “What cannot be taken for granted in the rush to the cloud is resiliency and scalability, which is near impossible to do without a distributed database that is elastic and self-healing.”