Nov 20, 2023

Investors have an appetite for databases, it seems. Today, ScyllaDB , a startup developing database tech for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, announced that it raised $43 million in a funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures with participation from AB Private Credit Investors, AllianceBernstein, TLV partners, Magma Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. The new cash will be put toward “accelerating” ScyllaDB’s momentum and expanding the size of its 168-person team, according to co-founder and CEO Dor Laor. “Today’s disruptors are ingesting an unprecedented amount of data and tapping it to deliver differentiating user experiences that transform markets and displace legacy leaders,” Laor told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Data is being enriched, cleaned, streamed, fed into AI and machine learning pipelines, replicated and cached from multiple sources. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a database that’s up to the task.” ScyllaDB is what’s known as a NoSQL database, which — unlike the relational databases once dominant in the enterprise — provides mechanisms for data storage and retrieval that don’t rely on a “tabular relations” model. In a tabular model, a relationship is a connection between two tables of data. But with a NoSQL database, relationships don’t have to follow this schema — offering greater engineering flexibility and, in some cases, improved performance. NoSQL databases are commonly used for applications like ad serving, AI and machine learning, recommendation and personalization engines, fraud detection and analyzing data from internet of things devices. According to a 2022 survey by Ventana, almost a quarter (22%) of organizations are using NoSQL databases in production today, while more than one-third (34%) are planning to adopt NoSQL databases within two years or evaluating their potential use. And the NoSQL market is expected to grow to $35.7 billion by 2028, up from $7.3 billion in 2022, the IMARC Group reports . Now, ScyllaDB’s not the only NoSQL vendor out there — far from it. There’s ArangoDB, Redis Labs and Crate.io to name a few, not to mention bigger players like MongoDB, Amazon’s DynamoDB and Couchbase. But ScyllaDB claims that its tech offers architectural advantages, like the ability to perform millions of operations per second with “single-digit millisecond” latency. Running across multiple clouds, on a hybrid cloud setup or on-premises, ScyllaDB automatically tunes I/O and CPU performance with workload prioritization, which co-locate workloads under a single server cluster. Those claims and capabilities were enough to win over customers, evidently. ScyllaDB says its database is now used by more than 400 companies, including Discord, Epic Games and Palo Alto Networks and that revenue has grown 800% since the company’s founding in December 2012. “Across industries, R&D teams are increasingly realizing that ScyllaDB’s dramatically different database architecture delivers better performance and horizontal scalability for data-intensive workloads,” Laor said. “ScyllaDB is designed to help fast-growing, fast-moving teams deliver lightning-fast user experiences at extreme scale … ScyllaDB’s unique architecture takes full advantage of modern cloud resources, delivering impressive efficiency and price-performance.” To date, ScyllaDB has raised $103 million in venture capital.