Open source database startup Yugabyte secures $48 mn from Lightspeed, others

Riding on the wave of cloud adoption and cloud-native relational database management systems, Yugabyte has raised $48 million (Rs 34.92 crore as per current exchange rates) in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, as it looks to expand its presence in the EMEA and APAC markets. 

Venture capital firm Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC also chipped in. The latest round is an expansion of a previous Series B fund raise of $30 million from June 2020. The company has so far raised about $103 million.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yugabyte, the company behind the  open source, high-performance distributed SQL database YugabyteDB, will use the fresh capital to expand its R&D, sales and customer function capabilities in the EMEA and APAC markets. The company is also looking to hire afresh, aiming to double headcount in 2020.

 “With companies of all kinds accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, technologies that help them accelerate, like YugabyteDB, are in high demand. This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets,” Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder and president, Yugabyte said in a statement.

The new infusion of capital will be additionally utilised in building its engineering, DevOps and support staff in India, Russia and Canada. To boost these capabilities in the APAC region, Yugabyte had recently acquired India-based Falarica.io.

The funding will also be used to accelerate enterprise adoption of Yugabyte’s  commercial products. Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service currently available on AWS and Google Cloud, have seen broad adoption in the past 12 months.

"Several different trends are intersecting in the enterprise—the exponential growth of data, the acceleration of digital transformation, and the move to cloud—forcing organizations to rethink how they manage their data and creating an opportunity for organizations like Yugabyte," said Ravi Mhatre, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners said in a statement.

“Today’s business environment demands flexibility and elasticity from database solutions, and distributed SQL is now critical for any organization where developer productivity and application uptime are top priorities. YugabyteDB makes something as fundamental and feature rich as PostgreSQL truly cloud native, resilient, elastic, and distributed,” Muthukkaruppan added. 

On the enterprise adoption front, Yugabyte has been growing in the e-commerce, financial services and telecommunications verticals where geographic data distribution, transactional capabilities and horizontal scalability are critical for systems of record.

Yugabyte customers include Hudson River Trading, Kroger, Narvar, Turvo, Manetu and Xignite, among others.

Yugabyte’s open source community members have deployed more 600,000 clusters to-date and the project’s contributor count is now over 170, with +2,600 community Slack members and over 300 certifications granted in the last 90 days.