Yugabyte's latest funding round values the distributed SQL system at $1.3bn

Double-decker database raises $188m from hungry VCs

Distributed relational database vendor Yugabyte has raised $188m in a Series C funding round which values the firm at around $1.3bn.

The investment spree was led by Sapphire Ventures, and included Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, and a bunch of other VCs.

Counting Wells Fargo, Kroger, Hudson River Trading, and Narvar among its customers, Yugabyte describes itself as sort of a double-decker database: a distributed system with Google Spanner underneath and a PostgreSQL-compatible RDBMS on top.

The first version of open-source Yugabyte was available in 2017. It launched a commercial Yugabyte Cloud, a public database-as-a-service, initially available on AWS and Google Cloud Platform in September.

The company said the latest funding would help build field and engineering teams. This would help accelerate enterprise adoption of the Yugabyte Cloud for any public, private, hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure.

"Regardless of whether you're a large enterprise modernizing your existing data infrastructure, a startup born in the cloud or something in between, Yugabyte’s cloud-native, open-source, geographically distributed SQL database can run on any cloud or Kubernetes environment," said Sapphire Ventures president and partner Jai Das about a company in which he is heavily invested.

Also this week, data integration and management firm Informatica raised $841m by selling 29 million shares in its IPO, somewhere near the lower end of the marketed offer. The launch indicated a $7.9bn market value for the 28-year-old firm.

A sense of déjà vu is not misplaced. The company had its first IPO in 1999 at the height of the dotcom boom before a private equity buyout in 2015 valued the firm at $5.3bn. ®