Cockroach Labs Boosts Its Value To $5 Billion With Latest Funding Round

The next-generation cloud database developer raised $278 million in a Series F round, capital the company will use to accelerate product development and market expansion.

Next-generation database developer Cockroach Labs has raised $278 million in a round of funding that more than doubles the company’s value to $5 billion.

New York-based Cockroach Labs will use the new capital to support ongoing development of its CockroachDB database software and cloud database-as-a-service, as well as continuing to grow its customer base and expand into new markets, the company said Thursday.

The Series F funding round comes less than a year after Cockroach Labs raised $160 million in January of this year in a round that put the company’s value at $2 billion. That round, in turn, followed an $86 million funding round in May 2020. Altogether the company, founded in 2015, has raised $633 million, according to the company.

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The latest funding round was led by Greenoaks with participation from Altimeter, BOND, Benchmark, Coatue, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures, J.P. Morgan, Lone Pine Capital, redpoint Ventures and Tiger Global.

Cockroach Labs develops CockroachDB, a cloud-native, distributed SQL database that’s designed to handle workloads with huge volumes of transactional data. The company’s motto of “scale fast, survive anything, thrive anywhere” (hence the Cockroach name) stems from the database’s elasticity, failure-resistant architecture and multi-cloud flexibility.

The database is also the foundation for Cockroach Cloud, the company’s database-as-a-service that launched in 2019.

Cockroach Labs, in the funding announcement, said the company has recorded “massive growth” with tripled annual recurring revenue over the last year and 500 percent growth in cloud revenue in just the last quarter alone “as customers shifted spending to the transactional database-as-a-service.”

“The future of application development is changing. Today’s users demand an always-on and near instantaneous experience, no matter where they are on the planet. Meeting those expectations requires a more resilient, scalable, geographically distributed data platform,” said Cockroach Labs co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball (pictured) in a statement.

The company now has more than 200 customers including Comcast, Bose, eBay, Mythical Games and Norfolk Southern. More than 50 percent of customers now run their applications on the CockroachDB Dedicated fully managed cloud service. Cockroach Labs also has doubled its workforce in the last year.

“We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in the industry,” Kimball said. “More organizations are embracing a cloud-first mentality, enterprises are building ever more complex data-driven applications, and on-demand services are rapidly becoming an imperative for businesses. CockroachDB was purpose-built for this new world, and our growth over the last several years validates our leadership in this emerging market.”

“The adoption of cloud-native databases is accelerating, driven by a fundamental shift towards a cloud-first mentality and the increasing demand for instantaneous, data-driven experiences,” said Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner of Greenoaks, in a statement. “Cockroach Labs is at the forefront of this opportunity for transactional data. They are an innovator and leader, fundamentally reshaping the way enterprises manage their data by offering a remarkably easy — and dramatically cheaper — way to operate the database for critical applications.”