Yugabyte raises $188M to grow distributed SQL database

Yugabyte said today it raised $188 million in Series C funding to advance its go-to-market and database engineering efforts.

The new funding is the second time this year the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based distributed SQL database vendor has raised money.

In March, Yugabyte said it raised $48 million in a Series B-1 round. That followed the vendor's $30 million B round in 2020, which came alongside the appointment of new CEO Bill Cook.

Yugabyte's open source database provides API compatibility with both the Apache Cassandra and PostgreSQL databases. Yugabyte has both on-premises and cloud-managed offerings for its YugabyteDB database.

The market for distributed transactional database management systems is an area of increasing interest to many organizations, according to Gartner analyst Merv Adrian.

He noted that since distributed databases allow transactions to be performed on any of the distributed nodes of a database instance without a loss of data integrity, they are popular with large, multinational companies that spend a lot of money on IT.

"Yugabyte is one of several vendors targeting this use case aggressively, and their move to the cloud and microservices helps both with differentiation and with targeting a hot marketplace," Adrian said.

He added that Yugabyte provides its customers a choice between fully managed and self-managed deployments, which enables the vendor to target different development and operational cultures and broadens its appeal.

The new funding shows that they are being noticed where it counts, and the opportunity to ramp up both engineering and sales will help them expand their foothold and compete in a rapidly growing segment.

"The new funding shows that they are being noticed where it counts, and the opportunity to ramp up both engineering and sales will help them expand their foothold and compete in a rapidly growing segment," Adrian said.

Yugabyte advances open source distributed SQL database

The open source YugabyteDB database has had multiple updates over the course of 2021 that have added new capabilities.

In February, YugabyteDB 2.4 was released, providing enhanced data query optimization and Apache Spark 3.0 support. In May, the vendor made YugabyteDB 2.7 generally available, introducing support for PostgreSQL tablespaces to enable more scalability for data operations.

Yugabyte co-founder and CTO Karthik Ranganathan explained that YugabyteDB's tablespace support extends the concept for distributed SQL.

He noted that typically with tablespaces a database administrator can specify which local storage device to use to store a table. With YugabyteDB, Ranganthan said administrators can now store tablespaces across different geographies in a distributed cluster.

YugabyteDB 2.9 came out in August. The update introduced a new smart client driver for SQL that enables application developers to build applications that can use a distributed SQL database.

Ranganthan explained that the driver, which is fundamental to SQL, was designed with a single database node.

As such, developers have had to write complex code in order for applications to properly use a distributed cluster. With the new smart client driver, Ranganthan said applications can now discover and make use of all the nodes in a distributed database.

YugabyteDB 2.11 is currently in development and set to be released sometime in November, adding new performance and optimization capabilities, the vendor said.