The round, led by 8VC, also includes participation from strategic investor Wipro Ventures and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. The round brings the company's total funding to $55 million. Yugabyte also adds Scott Yara, co-founder and former SVP of Products of Pivotal Software, to its board of directors.

The financing will be used to support the continued momentum of Yugabyte's open source project and drive broader enterprise adoption of its commercial products. Yugabyte's commercial products include Yugabyte Platform, a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service currently available on AWS and Google Cloud.

"We built YugabyteDB from the ground up to meet the untapped cloud native database demand from small and large enterprises alike. This round of funding from 8VC, Wipro Ventures, and others validates our approach," said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder and President, Yugabyte. "Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner & CTO at 8VC who led the investment and will join the Yugabyte board, is no stranger to enterprise data infrastructure; he worked at the core of Oracle and Informix databases and later helped fuel LinkedIn's growth as its Head of Data Engineering. We are thrilled to be working with Bhaskar and 8VC's dynamic team of investors with entrepreneurial roots that take a long-term view on disruptive technologies like ours."

In the past five years, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud have seen their annual revenues grow exponentially, from $7 billion to $70 billion. IDC predicts next year will be the "year of multi-cloud", driven by digital transformation acceleration due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Gartner predicts that in 2022 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform. With worldwide database management system (DBMS) revenue growing unabated to $46 billion in 2018 alone and Oracle Database adoption for new applications in terminal decline, Yugabyte is meeting the immediate market need for a cloud-neutral, 100% open source, relational database that adapts to any cloud and on-premises environment, without the risk of vendor lock-in from proprietary cloud databases.

Yugabyte's customer base continues to grow and includes Kroger, Narvar, Plume, Admiral and Xignite, among others. YugabyteDB's high performance, PostgreSQL compatibility and cloud-neutral abilities are essential features for companies focused on handling business-critical transactions at a massive, global scale. As a result, enterprises in Financial Services, Retail and Telecommunications verticals have already adopted YugabyteDB. Growth in the YugabyteDB open source community has also exploded, with a 4x increase in new clusters, a 13x increase in Slack users and a 3x increase in GitHub stars in the last year.

"Legacy source-of-truth databases form the beating heart of enterprises, and their movement to the cloud has just begun. This massive market deserves a product as beautifully architected and operable as the Yugabyte platform, and as formidable a team led by developer legends as Kannan, Karthik and Mikhail," said Ghosh. "8VC's mission is to support exceptional technical entrepreneurs who are building transformational technologies that will enable the next-generation of smart data-driven enterprises. I cannot think of anybody better positioned to be a leader in this space than Yugabyte and the 8VC team is excited to be part of its journey to transform the enterprise."

The funding comes on the heels of YugabyteDB 2.1, a major update that included expansion of geo-distributed deployment options, strengthening of enterprise security capabilities and a 10x increase in performance.

"We are excited to welcome Yugabyte into the Wipro Ventures portfolio and bring their modern database technology to Wipro's Global 1000 enterprise clients. We see a big opportunity to leverage Yugabyte's technology for building and powering our clients' newest web-scale applications. With geographic data distribution and high-performance requirements, distributed SQL provides very compelling value to our clients, particularly those in Financial Services and Retail," said Wipro Ventures managing partner Venu Pemmaraju.

About Yugabyte

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, internet-scale applications. YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance and cloud native agility, thus allowing enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. It is trusted by companies in cybersecurity, financial markets, IoT, retail, e-commerce, and other verticals. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is backed by 8VC, Wipro Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. www.yugabyte.com