Cockroach Labs caps two years of exceptional growth by raising $86.6M of new investment

The new round demonstrates Cockroach Labs' growing momentum as a major contender in the $230B, rapidly-growing cloud services market

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Cockroach Labs

May 05, 2020, 09:00 ET

NEW YORK, May 5, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, the leading enterprise-grade distributed SQL database, today announced $86.6 million in series D funding co-led by Altimeter Capital and BOND with participation from Benchmark, GV, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Capital.

This round brings Cockroach Labs' total funding to $195 million. Worldwide stay-at-home orders have dramatically increased demand for many businesses, putting increasing stress on the modern tech stack. Economic uncertainty is encouraging greater efficiency, setting the stage for further migration away from legacy, closed-source data platforms to modern, distributed, cloud-native tools. This round of funding will facilitate Cockroach Labs' growing investments in R&D to better support customers as they change to meet these new requirements. Enterprises in areas including communications, gaming and entertainment, e-commerce and financial services are scrambling to support increased consumer demand and remote workforces, and are finding that the resiliency and flexibility necessary to do so just isn't available without an elastically scalable, multi-cloud, modern data platform like CockroachDB.

Since its inception in 2016, the CockroachDB next-generation SQL database has helped organizations move and manage critical transactional data in the cloud. The software has developed an ardent and loyal following among architects, developers, and academics by capitalizing on the failed cloud migration promises of legacy database players and the risks associated with "lock-in" from the large public cloud vendors. This has resulted in year-over-year commercial customer growth of 295 percent. And once these users found what they were looking for in CockroachDB, they have doubled-down—first-year customers have, on average, expanded their usage 2x, and have renewed at a rate of over 90 percent.

Today, Fortune 500 CIOs are taking notice: while CockroachDB has only been available for two years, it is already in use at some of the world's largest enterprises across all industries, including Equifax, Bose and Comcast. More businesses are turning to CockroachDB to help in both expanding to meet new demand, reducing costs, and moving to the cloud. A recent survey of open roles, specifically for CockroachDB developers, on LinkedIn shows over 40 positions at 25 of the top enterprise companies across industries. Companies include Apple, Honey, Facebook, Tesla and Via.

"The migration to a multi-cloud environment has long been underway at many, if not all, of the top global enterprises. What cannot be taken for granted in the rush to the cloud is resiliency and scalability, which is near impossible to do without a distributed database that is elastic and self-healing," said CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, Spencer Kimball. "It's a given that this is the way of the future. But as that future approaches faster than many expected it is putting immense pressure on the enterprise to make this leap now, as quickly and effortlessly as possible. CockroachDB was purpose-built for mission-critical, data-intensive, cloud-deployed applications, and as a result, we are seeing a tremendous increase in demand for our services from companies small and large looking for bulletproof resiliency, effortless scalability and an overall more cost-effective platform."

A Massive Market, Ripe for Disruption
"The cloud has provided the opportunity to rethink all aspects of IT infrastructure and software," explained Tony Baer, principal at dbinsight. "CockroachDB is a prime example of how the cloud is reinventing databases, removing traditional shackles to scale and volume that have constrained them, clearing the way for new forms of globally-distributed applications that weren't thinkable before."

The worldwide public cloud services market is forecasted to grow nearly 20 percent in 2020 to a total upwards of $260 billion, according to an analyst firm. It also expects that by 2022, 75 percent of all databases (which saw 18.4 percent of growth in revenue in 2018) will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform. With double-digit growth in the database market, this represents a larger move away from legacy players like Oracle as companies look for more nimble cloud-native databases. Amidst such growth, the greatest innovation is coming from companies that arose out of the open-source software movement, many of which are poised to disrupt slower-moving players operating on either decades-old technology or on an assembly of services cobbled together via acquisition. As the world's first cloud-native, distributed SQL database, Cockroach Labs is the only player in the space built from the ground up with the needs of the global enterprise in mind.

"Legacy players have long dominated the enterprise software market. With recent investments in companies like Confluent, Snowflake, and now Cockroach Labs, we're seeing huge market disruption as enterprises move to the cloud and build on a modern tech stack, replacing legacy companies, who are struggling to adapt," said Kevin Wang, partner at Altimeter Capital. "Cockroach Labs is leading this next evolution with a world-class team, ambitious vision, and a transformative product. It's a great time to be in the cloud business."

Cockroach most recently closed a $55 million Series C financing round last summer to invest in hiring new talent—doubling its headcount over the past twelve months—and furthering research and development.

About Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs helps organizations migrate and manage critical transactional data in the cloud with their next-generation SQL database. CockroachDB uses distribution and replication of data to deliver bulletproof resilience, effortless scale, and can tie data to a location to deliver optimal performance and regulatory compliance. It is architected to run a broad range of applications on and across clouds, on-premise, or in hybrid environments – all as a single store. Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs is backed by Benchmark, GV, Firstmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Capital and Workbench. For more information, please visit www.cockroachlabs.com.

About Altimeter Capital
Altimeter Capital Management is a technology focused investment firm managing public and private investment funds. Private software investments have included AppDynamics, HubSpot, MongoDB, Okta, Snowflake, and Twilio. Altimeter was founded in 2008 and has offices in Menlo Park, CA and Boston, MA.

About BOND
BOND is a global technology investment firm that supports visionary founders throughout their entire life cycle of innovation and growth. BOND's founding partners have backed industry pioneers such Spotify, Square, Peloton, DocuSign, and Uber.

Contact:
Katelyn DiSalvo
[email protected]

SOURCE Cockroach Labs