YugaByte, creator of YugaByte DB, the leading cloud native transactional database for globally distributed applications, today announced it has secured $16 million in additional funding. This latest investment round was co-led by Dell Technologies Capital and previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"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 Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Co-Founder and CEO of YugaByte. "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."

YugaByte's founders, Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin are the engineers that led the massive scaling of Facebook's NoSQL platform which powers Facebook Messenger and its internal time series monitoring system. "The YugaByte team has built upon their deep experience with Cassandra and HBase at Facebook to deliver a true next generation distributed database, while preserving API compatibility with the systems we use today," said Jeff Rothschild, former VP of Infrastructure at Facebook. "YugaByte DB delivers turnkey distributed, consistent and highly available data access with cache level performance." Prior to founding YugaByte, Kannan and Karthik also played a key role in building the infrastructure for Nutanix's hybrid cloud.

Database Market Continues to Grow

Analysts are projecting the database market to grow to $60B by 2022. Given the continued expansion of the database market, YugaByte aims to capitalize on the convergence of three trends; ongoing demand for SQL databases, the accelerating adoption of NoSQL databases, and the inevitable migration of business-critical data to containers and the cloud.

"In today's multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud world, applications are becoming portable but databases are not. Fortune 500 CIOs are starting to re-platform the data layer for scalability, developer friendliness and cloud-neutrality," said Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director, Dell Technologies Capital. "YugaByte is helping democratize the transactional database layer by offering a single non-proprietary database that can span public and private clouds. YugaByte's 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's built-in native compatibility to popular NoSQL and SQL interfaces."

Dell Technologies Capital, which came out of stealth last year, has been an active investor in nearly 90 early-stage startups since 2012 with 37 successful exits, including 3 unicorn IPOs within the past nine months.

Business-Critical Apps Require a Cloud Native Transactional Data Tier

Business-critical applications are increasingly being deployed onto cloud native microservice architectures running on Docker and Kubernetes. As a result, these applications are requiring the underlying data tier to offer capabilities that can prove incredibly challenging for traditional databases to support.

For example, many organizations rely on SQL databases like Oracle and PostgreSQL for their ACID compliant systems of record. However, unlike many SQL databases, YugaByte DB offers the ability to horizontally scale nodes globally, across regions, while remaining fully ACID compliant. YugaByte DB also delivers linear write/read scalability, plus auto-rebalancing, sharding and failover. These features often prove to be very costly or difficult to implement in traditional SQL databases.

Organizations also rely on NoSQL databases like Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB, AWS DynamoDB, Apache Cassandra and MongoDB for workloads requiring fast write performance, flexible schemas and fault-tolerance. YugaByte DB delivers all the features you'd expect from a NoSQL database plus high performance ACID transactions, elastic global data distribution across multiple public and private clouds.

YugaByte's multi-model database offers support for Apache Cassandra and Redis APIs, along with beta support for PostgreSQL API -- all three powered by a common underlying database storage and replication engine.

"YugaByte is going to be interesting to any enterprise requiring an elastic data tier for their cloud-native applications. Even more so if they have a requirement to operate across multiple clouds or in a Kubernetes environment," said Ian Andrews, VP Products, Pivotal. "By combining NoSQL and SQL API compatibility within a single cloud-native database, an organization's developers become more productive, while operators benefit from the reduced complexity."

YugaByte DB Powers Business-Critical Apps at Planet Scale

Version 1.0 of YugaByte DB is already enabling organizations to realize the advantages of combining SQL and NoSQL in a single database.

YugaByte DB powers the Location Tracking Service at Turvo, a real-time collaborative logistics platform. "We are revolutionizing logistics with a collaborative, connected IoT platform to create the Internet of Shipping," said Turvo CTO and co-founder, Sai Nagboth. "This requires a 100 percent reliable transactional database that is capable of near-infinite scaling and can serve large datasets at very low latencies. YugaByte DB is that database for us."

"YugaByte was easy to get started with using known APIs such as Redis and Cassandra, and eliminated the need for multiple data tiers like a separate cache and multiple DBs. It is now a lot quicker to build and roll out features. Additionally, we can handle our peak season load by scaling out in just a few minutes," said Uday Shanmugam, Chief Architect, Narvar.

Additional Supporting Quotes

Ravi Mhatre, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners

"We are excited to deepen our commitment in YugaByte to fuel their ongoing expansion. We firmly believe there remains a huge opportunity in enabling companies who want to drive innovation and growth by moving their business-critical online services to cloud native infrastructure."

About YugaByte

YugaByte is the company behind YugaByte DB, the cloud native, transactional, high-performance database for planet-scale cloud applications. YugaByte DB converges the operational database needs of mission-critical applications into an easy-to-manage, unified platform, allowing enterprises to focus on growing their business rather than managing complex infrastructure. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook engineers and database experts, YugaByte is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. YugaByte is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital.

Learn more at www.yugabyte.com and follow us @YugaByte.