Months after bagging $116 million in an extension of its Series F round, database vendor SingleStore this week announced that it raised an additional $30 million from investors, including Prosperity7, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco. The Series F — or “Series F-2,” technically — now stands at $146 million, bringing SingleStore’s total raised to $412 million (notwithstanding an as-yet unused $50 million credit line from Silicon Valley Bank).
In an email interview with TechCrunch, Raj Verma said that the new capital will be put toward product development and engineering efforts as well as supporting investments in sales. He also said that it’ll be used to fund geographic expansion as SingleStore eyes a broader swath of customers across Europe and Asia.
“SingleStore helps businesses adapt more quickly, embrace diverse data and accelerate digital innovation by operationalizing all data through one platform,” Verma said. “Its proprietary, simplified, data-agnostic approach is built so that organizations can act with informed insights to make business-critical decisions fast.”
SingleStore was founded as MemSQL in 2011 by Eric Frenkiel, Adam Prout and Nikita Shamgunov; Verma became the CEO in 2020 after a year in a co-CEO role. The company’s technology is what’s known as a relational database, meaning it uses a structure of rows and columns to identify and access data in relation to other data components in the database.
By separating storage and compute, Verma claims that SingleStore’s database platform can process a trillion rows per second, ingest billions of rows of data an hour and host databases with tens of thousands of tables. Use cases span real-time analytics, operational AI, predictive maintenance and pretty much any other app or service that relies on a structured database for storage.
Among other rivals, SingleStore competes with Imply, Oracle, Snowflake and MongoDB for relational database service market share. But with roughly 300 customers, the nearly-400-employee company — whose valuation remains above $1 billion — appears well-positioned for expansion in the growing market for database services.
Venture funding continues to pour into the so-called “big data” analytics market, particularly where it concerns startups offering cloud products and services. As John Foley notes in a recent piece, five companies — Dbt Labs, Hasura, Redpanda Data, Semi Technologies and Timescale — together pulled in a total of nearly $500 million in new investments during the first few months of 2022 alone.
Gartner predicts that 75% of all databases will be migrated to a cloud service by 2022. And according to one survey, the number of firms investing more than $50 million a year in big data and AI initiatives rose to 33.9% in 2019.
Source @TechCrunch
