Wipro Ventures backs open source database startup Yugabyte

Wipro Ventures, the investment arm of Bengaluru headquartered information technology (IT) services company Wipro, has backed SQL database startup Yugabyte in a Series B funding round.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company has raised $30 million in an oversubscribed round, led by venture capital firm 8VC, as per a statement. Wipro Ventures, along with returning investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital, also participated in the round, it said.

The fresh funds will be used to support Yugabyte’s open source project and drive broader enterprise adoption of its commercial products, the company said.

Additionally, Bhaskar Ghosh, partner and CTO at investor 8VC, along with Scott Yara, co-founder and former senior vice president of products at Pivotal Software, have been inducted to its board of directors, the company said. 

Bill Cook, former president of Pivotal Software, recently took over the position of CEO from the company’s co-founder Kannan Muthukkaruppan. The latter is now the president of the startup.

Muthukkaruppan founded Yugabyte, an open-source cloud-native database for mission-critical applications, with fellow former Facebook engineers Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin in 2016.

YugabyteDB, its flagship product, is an open source, distributed SQL database to build global, internet-scale applications. The product caters to companies in the cybersecurity, financial markets, internet of things, retail and ecommerce verticals.

The firm also runs Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service platform, and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

“We see a big opportunity to leverage Yugabyte’s technology for building and powering our clients’ newest web-scale applications. With geographic data distribution and high-performance requirements, distributed SQL provides very compelling value to our clients, particularly those in financial services and retail (sectors),” Venu Pemmaraju, managing partner at Wipro Ventures, said.

The IT services firm will leverage Yugabyte’s modern database technology to help its global enterprise clients, he added.

Wipro Ventures, set up in 2015 and managed by veteran Biplab Adhya and managing partner Pemmaraju, has so far funded 16 companies in the US, Israel and India. It has also backed five venture capital funds focused on enterprise technology in New York and Los Angeles. Its sole India investment is in modern data management platform Imanis Data, formerly called Talena, which has a development centre in Pune. Earlier today, the company also announced its investment in another Sunnyvale-based firm CloudKnox Security. 

In January, Wipro’s investment unit launched a $150 million fund to back early-to-mid-stage companies in the enterprise software solutions space across geographies. Its first fund, set up in 2014 with a $100 million corpus, backed companies that focused on technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, cloud infrastructure, financial technology, healthcare, robotics, internet of things and cybersecurity.