Database Startup Cockroach Labs Raises $160M In Financing, Valuation Hits $2B

Company will apply the funding to accelerating product development to capitalize on the “massive market opportunity” of businesses moving their transactional data to cloud-based databases.

Cloud database developer Cockroach Labs has raised $160 million in a Series E round of funding, boosting the startup’s valuation to an impressive $2 billion.

The new funding, which comes just eight months after the company raised $86.6 million in a Series D round, brings the New York-based company’s total financing to $355.1 million.

Cockroach Labs, founded in 2015, develops CockroachDB, a cloud-native, distributed SQL database that’s designed to handle workloads with huge volumes of transactional data. The company’s motto of “scale fast, survive anything, thrive anywhere” (hence the Cockroach name) stems from the database’s elasticity, failure-resistant architecture and multi-cloud flexibility.

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The funding round was led by Altimeter Capital, which participated in Cockroach Labs’ Series C and D rounds, with participation by new investors Greenoaks and Lone Pine and existing investors Benchmark, BOND, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures and Tiger Global.

Cockroach Labs said it will use the additional financing to “aggressively pursue [the] massive market opportunity” of businesses and organizations moving transactional data to cloud-based databases. The company said it will specifically apply the investments to product development – including completing a “forever free” version of its database for development and education purposes that the company will soon release into beta.

The company also said it is “hiring in every department.” Cockroach Labs currently has more than 200 employees.

Cockroach Labs said it more than doubled both its revenue and its customer roster in 2020. The company said its growth was spurred, in part, by the COVID-19 pandemic that led to a surge in demand for digital services from work-from-home employees.

More than half of Cockroach Labs’ customers are running their critical applications on CockroachCloud, the fully managed cloud instance of CockroachDB that became generally available on AWS and the Google Cloud Platform last year, according to the company. The company also said it has built a loyal following of developers who are building applications that run on the next-generation database.

Database management system (DBMS) market revenue is currently valued at $55.4 billion and Cockroach Labs cited a Gartner report forecasting that by 2022 75 percent of all databases will be deployed or migrated to cloud platforms.

“The story of transactional SQL workloads moving to the cloud is still largely unwritten and represents a tremendous opportunity for the next Oracle-like business to emerge,” said Neil Mehta, a partner at Greenoaks Capital, in a statement.

“CockroachDB’s high availability, strong consistency, and low latency allows them to address the lion’s share of these relational workloads. Cockroach Labs offers a remarkable experience. It removes much of the incremental cost of scaling, driving massive cost-savings and improving developer agility,” Mehta said.