DataStax has raised $45 million for its scalable, high-performance database platform. The Series D round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Next World Capital and previous investors.
DataStax will use the funding to build out globally and invest in Apache Cassandra, the NoSQL open-source project and foundation for the company’s database distributions. The funding also signals a potential IPO for DataStax but much will depend on the direction of the markets, said CEO Billy Bosworth in an interview yesterday. “We are building the company for that direction (IPO),” he said. “A l lot depends on external factors. Internally, the company is already starting that process.”
With the funding, DataStax is also releasing the 3.1 version of its enterprise-grade and community-edition database software, promising more data load capabilities, faster search and better usability.
Founded in 2010, DataStax has become the chief committer to Apache Cassandra, known for its high performance and scalability. But Cassandra is relatively new and not many people know how to use it. Faced with growing demand, DataStax has invested considerably in Cassandra as a way to bring more people into the community and develop the usability of the platform. With this latest round, DataStax will continue investing in Cassandra with efforts including more meetups, especially in Asia and Latin America where it is looking to expand.
The funding comes as companies begin the migration from relational databases to the data-intensive NoSQL environments popular with developers. NoSQL databases are designed for the new age of the multi-tenant cloud as much as relational database products that have traditionally run on single servers. The market has opened up so much that IBM has standardized on MongoDB, managed by 10Gen, and arguably the most popular of the NoSQL database technologies.
In the meantime, the database market continues to find its new identity. For while NoSQL is all the rage with the startups, the reality is changing a well for companies that have spent years running their transaction-based systems on relational databases. Now, as more traditional companies generate more data, DataStax is finding no lack of customers. But this new world is also opening the market to a new hybrid-style database, which we are seeing from companies like FoundationDB, a NoSQL provider which last week acquired Akiban, part of the NewSQL family that seeks to marry the scalable performance of NoSQL with the transaction-oriented strength of relational database systems.