Crate Data, an open source data store for developers, has raised $1.5 million from Sunstone and DFJ Esprit.

Crate Data, which makes real time SQL queries on large data sets super simple, also announced its general availability. It is already in use by thousands of developers. Through its distributed real time SQL engine and a massively parallel shared nothing architecture, it enables tens of thousands of concurrent real time queries, even while dealing with a massive inflow of data, problems that today's software only partially solves.

Crate Data's modern architecture integrates powerful distributed search into the core of a state-of-the-art database and lets developers store tabular data, unstructured records and binary objects while enabling real-time SQL queries and fulltext search.

Jodok Batlogg, Crate's CEO, said: 'We have worked with very large data sets for many years. It became crystal clear that a modern distributed database architecture that can be accessed through SQL is required. We also focused on extreme simplicity to run a highly available data store - something that developers have wanted for a very long time and never received - until now.'

Crate was founded in 2013 by Mr Batlogg alongside co-founders Christian Lutz and Bernd Dorn, founding contributors to Zope and Plone. It is based in Austria and Berlin.

Hubert �ępicki, of Amberbit, a development house, said his company turned to Crate to store millions of events after they 'ran into speed problems with traditional technology'. 'Now queries work superfast.'

Nikolaj Nyholm, a Partner at Sunstone, said: 'Crate is a simple, yet powerful, datastore which removes many of the pipes and glue of high-performance web and enterprise applications. This has been affirmed by the scores of developers who are now engaging as users and by the contributors to Crate.' Crate is Sunstone's third open source developer software investment.

Gil Dibner, a Partner at DFJ Esprit, said: 'Just like Software as a Service broke the on-premise software installation paradigm with the no-software message, it is about time that the tech industry goes for massively scalable and simple data stores, a 'no-database-administration' approach. As more and more big data applications are deployed, the need for an easy to scale data store like Crate's becomes obvious.'

The Crate investment is Mr Dibner's first since joining DFJ Esprit.

Mr Nyholm and Mr Dibner will join the Crate Data Board of Directors.

Crate Data is Open Source and the company offers an enterprise version that is priced by cluster and not by node, freeing developers from irrelevant constraints when scaling.

About Sunstone:

Founded in 2007 with headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, Sunstone is a leading European early-stage technology and life sciences venture capital firm. The partnership manages around EUR 700 million in committed capital across seven funds.

About DFJ Esprit:

DFJ Esprit is one of Europe's most experienced venture capital investors, helping entrepreneurs to build groundbreaking technology companies. In the last 3 years, DFJ Esprit's exits have generated more than $2.3bn in combined enterprise value. DFJ Esprit is the exclusive European member of the Silicon Valley-based DFJ Global Network with 30 offices around the world, $7bn in funds under management, and portfolio companies including Baidu, Box, Skype, Space X, Tesla, and Yammer and other world leading companies.

About Crate:

Crate Data is an easy to use, real time SQL data store with powerful search capabilities. It is built based on a shared-nothing architecture, and scales massively. Developers can store tabular data, unstructured records and binary objects, as well as query and search live data with SQL. Crate Data supports a super-easy rapid install on commodity hardware or in the cloud, with high availability included.