INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Looking to expand the footprint of its toolkit giving developers a unified database software that can work for both relational and
post-relational databases, YugaByte has raised $16 million in a new round of funding.
For company co-founder and chief executiveKannan
Muthukkaruppan, the new database software liberates developers from the risk of lock-in with any provider of cloud compute as the leading
providers at Amazon, Microsoft and Google jockey for the pole position among software developers, and reduces programming
complexity.
&YugaByte DB makes it possible for organizations to standardize on a single, distributed database to support a multitude of
workloads requiring both SQL and NoSQL capabilities
This speeds up the development of applications while at the same time reduces operational complexity and licensing costs,& said
Muthukkaruppan in a statement.
Muthukkaruppan and his fellow co-founders know their way around database software
Alongside Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin, Muthukkaruppan built the NoSQL platform that powered Facebook Messenger and its internal
time series monitoring system
Before that Ranganathan and Muthukkaruppan had spent time working at Oracle
And after Facebook the two men were integral to the development of Nutanix hybrid infrastructure.
&These are tens of petabytes of data
handling tens of millions of messages a day,& says Muthukkaruppan.
Ranganathan and Muthukkaruppan left Nutanix in 2016 to begin working on
YugaByte database software
What important, founders and investors stress, is that YugaByte breaks any chains that would bind software developers to a single platform
or provider.
While developers can move applications from one cloud provider to another, they have to maintain multiple databases across
these systems so that they inter-operate.
&YugaByte value proposition is strong for both CIOs, who can avoid cloud vendor lock-in at the
database layer, and for developers, who don&t have to re-architect existing applications because of YugaByte built-in native compatibility
to popular NoSQL and SQL interfaces,& saidDeepak Jeevankumar, a managing director at Dell Technologies Capital.
Jeevankumar firm co-led the
latest $16 million financing for YugaByte alongside previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.
What attracted Lightspeed and Dell new
investment arm was the support the company has from engineers in the trenches, like Ian Andrews, the vice president of products at
Pivotal.&YugaByte is going to be interesting to any enterprise requiring an elastic data tier for their cloud-native applications,& Andrews
&Even more so if they have a requirement to operate across multiple clouds or in a Kubernetes environment.&
With new software
infrastructure, portability is critical, as data needs to move between and among different software architectures.
The problem is that
traditional databases have a hard time scaling, and new database technologies aren&t incredibly reliable when it comes to data consistency
So developers have been using legacy database software from folks like Oracle and PostgreSQL for their systems of record and then new
database software like Microsoft Azure CosmosDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Apache Cassandra (which the fellas used at Facebook) or MongoDB for
distributed transactions for applications (things like linear write/read scalability, plus auto-rebalancing, sharding and failover).
With
YugaByte, software developers get support for Apache Cassandra and Redis APIs, along with support for PostgreSQL, which the company touts as
the best of both the relational and post-relational database worlds.
Now that the company has $16 million more in the bank, it can begin
spreading the word about the benefits of its new database software, saysMuthukkaruppan.
&With the additional funding we will accelerate
investments in engineering, sales and customer success to scale our support for enterprises looking to bring their business-critical data to
the cloud,& he said in a statement.
