Database Startup Yugabyte Raises $188M In New Funding Round

The additional financing, which boosts Yugabyte’s valuation to more than $1.3 billion, comes just weeks after the launch of the company’s cloud database service.

Next-generation database developer Yugabyte has raised $188 million in a Series C funding round that puts the startup’s valuation at more than $1.3 billion.

The latest funding, coming just seven months after Yugabyte’s previous round of $48 million, brings the company’s total funding to more than $290 million, the company said Thursday

Yugabyte plans to use the additional capital to grow the company’s field and engineering teams and accelerate its expansion into new markets, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said in the funding announcement.

[Related: The 10 Hottest Big Data Startups Of 2021 (So Far)]

The latest funding round was led by Sapphire Ventures with participation from Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and others, the company said. Sapphire President and partner Jai Das is joining the Yugabyte board of directors.

Yugabyte develops YugabyteDB, a distributed SQL database designed to handle huge amounts of data spanning multiple geographic regions and availability zones. The PostgreSQL-compatible database supports global, business-critical applications – such as in cybersecurity and financial services – that require low query latency and extreme resilience against failures.

Just last month Yugabyte launched Yugabyte Cloud, a fully managed database-as-a-service based on YugabyteDB for building new cloud-based applications and moving legacy applications to cloud platforms.

Yugabyte and other next-generation database providers tout their products as an alternative to traditional relational database systems, arguing that older monolithic databases were not designed for today’s cloud-native applications. With its geographic data distribution, scalability and transactional capabilities, Yugabyte promotes the database’s use for customer-facing applications and for supporting edge computing and IoT systems.

The Yugabyte database has been adopted by businesses in the retail, financial services and telecommunications industries and the company lists Wells Fargo, Kroger and Hudson River Trading among its customers.

“As organizations embrace digital transformation and endeavor to become more data-driven, the need for a cloud-native database that can scale with them grows,” said Yugabyte CEO Bill Cook in a statement.

“YugabyteDB was built to address this expanding market and to meet the current and future needs of any business, regardless of their cloud infrastructure. We are thrilled to have more resources at our disposal to help us better serve our customers, and we are excited to draw on Jai’s wealth of knowledge in this space going forward,” Cook said.