FoundationDB, the company behind next generation database software that uniquely combines scalability and consistency, today announced that it has closed $17 million in a Series A funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures with additional investment from CrunchFund and existing angel investors. The investment will fuel the company’s growth in sales and marketing, engineering, and support for existing enterprise customers. Sutter Hill Managing Director, Sam Pullara will join FoundationDB’s Board of Directors.
“We see the future of database technology as combining the scalable, distributed architecture of NoSQL with the power of ACID transactions,” said Dave Rosenthal, CEO of FoundationDB. “The financing we’ve secured in this funding round strengthens our commitment to our existing customers and allows us to scale to better serve the needs of future ones. We’re very fortunate to have Sam, a seasoned technologist who shares our conviction, joining our board.”
Founded in 2009 by the team responsible for Visual Sciences’ market-leading analytics technology (now part of Adobe), FoundationDB’s vision is to build the ideal storage engine for modern distributed applications. FoundationDB’s technology provides the benefits of ACID transactions with the scalability and operational benefits associated with NoSQL. FoundationDB launched general availability of its platform in August 2013 after an 18-month alpha/beta program with more than 2,000 participants.
“I’ve followed the NoSQL space with interest for years waiting to invest in a company and technology that stood out from the crowd,” said Sam Pullara, Managing Director of Sutter Hill Ventures. “The approach and discipline of the FoundationDB team is astonishing — they spent four years building the most rigorously engineered piece of software I’ve seen in the last 20 years. When I first encountered the claims made by FoundationDB about their technology I was naturally skeptical, but when I learned who was behind it and saw the success of others using it, I had to take a closer look. Today, I work closely with one of our portfolio companies who is building their architecture on FoundationDB and can confirm first hand that the technology lives up to the lofty claims.”
FoundationDB further sets itself apart from NoSQL solutions by efficiently supporting many different data models (graph, document, key-value, SQL, etc.) via a growing collection of open-source layers. Applications and libraries built as layers on FoundationDB inherit the same exceptional performance, data consistency and operational resilience as FoundationDB itself.
“FoundationDB offers a distributed, transactional data store capable of supporting multiple languages and data models suitable for running multiple applications without requiring administrators to manage multiple databases,” said Matt Aslett, Research Director, Data Management and Analytics, 451 Research. “We believe this multi-model approach will become more important as enterprises look to standardize on next-generation distributed data platforms that are capable of serving a variety of consistency requirements and query approaches.”
FoundationDB’s Community License allows for clusters of up to six processes to be used for free, even in production, giving everyone access to high performance ACID transactions, exceptional fault tolerance, and layers. FoundationDB offers Enterprise licensing and support priced starting at $99 per process per month including premium support and the ability to run larger clusters.
The FoundationDB software can be deployed on a single machine, on a cluster in a private datacenter, or in the cloud. FoundationDB supports Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows and includes APIs for C, Python, Ruby, Node.js and Java.
