MariaDB Raises $25M In New Funding To Expand Its SkySQL DBaaS Operations
The extension of the C Series financing brings the total funding for the developer of the popular MariaDB database to more than $125 million.
MariaDB, developer of its popular namesake database, has raised $25 million in new funding the company will use to support the ambitious market goals of its recently debuted MariaDB SkySQL cloud Database-as-a-Service.
“The main impetus for this round was to put more wood behind the arrow for SkySQL,” said CEO Michael Howard in an interview with CRN. “The kind of applications I’m seeing on SkySQL right now were unfathomable just 12 months ago.”
MariaDB, founded in 2014, is the company behind the MariaDB database, a community-developed, commercially supported offshoot of the MySQL relational database. The company has its headquarters in Helsinki, Finland with headquarters for the Americas in Redwood City, Calif.
[Related: The Big Data 100 2020]
Database-as-a-Service, fully managed cloud database systems, are now offered by many database software vendors including established players like Oracle and next-generation database vendors like MongoDB. NoSQL database company Couchbase began offering its Couchbase Cloud service just last month. And Amazon Web Services competes with multiple cloud database offerings such as Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Aurora.
MariaDB launched SkySQL in March, offering the Database-as-a-Service for both transactional and business analytics tasks. The DBaaS uses Kubernetes for container orchestration; the ServiceNow workflow engine for inventory, configuration and workflow management; and the Prometheus and Grafana technologies for real-time monitoring and visualization.
In May the company expanded the SkySQL functionality with the ability for businesses and organizations to customize database options and configurations to meet enterprise-class security, high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
The $25 million in new funding is an extension of an earlier C Series funding round, CEO Howard said, and brings the company’s total financing to more than $125 million. The latest financing was led by SmartFin Capital with participation from existing investors and new investor GP Bullhound.
The new financing will be used to scale up SkySQL operations, Howard said, including expanding the site reliability engineering team that supports the DBaaS’ underlying infrastructure and the technical development team that develops SkySQL itself.
SkySQL now has customers in 35 countries, Howard said. The company works with reseller distributors like Insight Enterprises and Computacenter and systems integration and consulting partners like Epidata and Seraro. Howard said a number of systems integrators have application development practices for building applications that run on SkySQL.