Yugabyte Announces $188 Million in Series C Funding

Yugabyte emerged from stealth in 2017, proclaiming that its name – derived from the Sanskrit word “yuga,” meaning an era – was meant to signify “data that lives forever without limits.” Four years (not quite a yuga) later, Yugabyte has certainly made an impression: as of today’s announcement of $188 million in Series C funding, the company’s valuation is now in excess of $1.3 billion.

Yugabyte offers an open-source distributed SQL database, YugabyteDB, as well as Yugabyte Cloud, a fully managed database-as-a-service that just launched last month. As Yugabyte CEO Bill Cook explained to Datanami last year, the company is aiming to strike a balance, offering the familiarity and stability of database systems like Oracle while improving on scalability and flexibility. “It’s not that [Oracle database] isn’t cutting it any longer. It’s that, if you look at where the future is headed in a multi-cloud, scale-out and [need] to be more cost effective, [customers are] looking for alternatives,” Cook said at the time.

“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,” Cook said about the news today. “YugabyteDB was built to address this expanding market and to meet the current and future needs of any business, regardless of their cloud infrastructure.”

The Series C funding was led by Sapphire Ventures with new participation from Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, and Wells Fargo, with returning investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8vC, Dell Technologies Capital, and Wipro Ventures. Yugabyte previously announced $48 million in funding this March and $30 million in Series B funding last June. This latest round nearly triples Yugabyte’s total funding as of March, which stood at $108 million. In today’s press release, Yugabyte said that the new funding would be used to grow the company’s field and engineering teams and fund expansion into new markets.

As it did with its Series B round, when it added Bhaskar Ghosh from round leader 8VC to its board of directors – Yugabyte has now added Jai Das, president of Sapphire Ventures, to its board, as well. “We are thrilled to have more resources at our disposal to help us better serve our customers,” Cook said, “and we are excited to draw on Jai’s wealth of knowledge in this space going forward.”

“The beauty of YugabyteDB lies in its power and simplicity, working for any organization and at any stage,” Das said. “Developers love its compatibility, CIOs love its flexibility and architects love their data is always available and accessible from anywhere. Yugabyte is an exceptional technology built by an exceptional founding team. We’re thrilled to back Yugabyte and help scale it to a company of consequence.”