The round was led by Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed Venture Partners and other prominent angels including Jeff Rothschild, former VP of Infrastructure at Facebook. Bipul Sinha, CEO of Rubrik, is also a strategic advisor to the company.

The founders, Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan, and Mikhail Bautin, are ex-Facebook engineers who were instrumental in scaling and maturing Apache HBase for massive real-time workloads such as Facebook Messages & Facebook's Operational Data Store. At YugaByte, they have assembled a stellar team of distributed systems and database experts from Facebook, Oracle, Nutanix & Google and built a fundamentally new database for modern, mission-critical applications.

"The knowledge and experience of YugaByte's leadership team is just one of the many reasons we chose to invest," said Ravi Mhatre, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners. "Companies today are looking for ways to drive innovation and growth, and YugaByte, with this new cloud-native database for mission-critical data, does just that. We are excited to be on this journey with the team.''

Mission-critical applications are increasingly migrating to a cloud-native microservices architecture. The primary driver for this move is a desire to retain business agility and reduce costs. These applications require infrastructure that is highly elastic and resilient to failure, reconfigurable with zero downtime, geo-distributed and portable across clouds. While the container ecosystem led by Docker & Kubernetes has enabled enterprises to realize this vision for the application tier, the data tier has remained a big challenge. This is because the legacy SQL and NoSQL databases were never architected for today's cloud.

YugaByte DB takes the learnings from databases such as Oracle, Apache HBase, Apache Cassandra and Google Spanner to bring the best of the SQL and NoSQL paradigms in a unified platform that is purpose built for cloud-native infrastructure agility. It easily scales up and down on public clouds, on-premises datacenters and even across hybrid environments while ensuring zero data loss and always-on data availability. It thus serves as the ideal stateful complement to Docker and Kubernetes.

"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 will deliver turnkey distributed, consistent and highly available data access with cache level performance. I look forward to YugaByte's success as a company and I'm impressed by the advanced architecture and wider technology proposition presented here."

"YugaByte aims to make the complicated easy, so our users can focus on growing their business and not spend all their time managing complex database systems," said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, CEO and co-founder of YugaByte. "Yuga in Sanskrit represents an era or an epoch, and the name YugaByte signifies data without limits. Our ultimate goal is to simplify mission-critical data, and we believe YugaByte does just that."

About YugaByte
YugaByte is an open-source cloud-native database for mission-critical applications. It is meant to be a system-of-record/authoritative database that applications can rely on for correctness and availability. The YugaByte DB converges the operational database needs of these applications into an easy-to-manage, unified platform, allowing enterprises to focus on growing their business rather than managing complex infrastructure.

Find us at www.yugabyte.com and on Twitter @YugaByte.