[Funding alert] Yugabyte raises $48M led by Lightspeed Venture Partners

Open-source distributed SQL database Yugabyte announced a $48 million funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Technologies, and 8VC.

Last year, the startup raised $30 million in capital in June 2020. This recent round brings Yugabyte’s total funding to $103 million.

The funding will be used to expand Yugabyte’s R&D, sales and customer functions in the EMEA and APAC markets. To support its aggressive expansion plans, Yugabyte will double its headcount in 2021.

“Today’s business environment demands flexibility and elasticity from database solutions, and distributed SQL is now critical for any organisation where developer productivity and application uptime are top priorities. YugabyteDB makes something as fundamental and feature rich as PostgreSQL truly cloud native, resilient, elastic, and distributed,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Co-Founder and President, Yugabyte.

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"With companies of all kinds accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, technologies that help them accelerate, like YugabyteDB, are in high demand. This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets," he added.

With the new infusion of capital, Yugabyte is building out its engineering, DevOps, and support staff in India, Russia, and Canada. It recently acquired India-based Falarica.io to accelerate its development and recruiting efforts in the APAC region.

The company is also expanding its sales teams in EMEA and APAC because of strong demand for its open source distributed SQL database, and related products and services.

Enterprise adoption of YugabyteDB continues to accelerate, particularly in the ecommerce, financial services, and telecommunications verticals where geographic data distribution, transactional capabilities, and horizontal scalability are critical for systems of record.

Yugabyte customers include Hudson River Trading, Kroger, Narvar, Turvo, Manetu, and Xignite, among others.

Over the past year, organisations have transitioned more work and non-work activities to the cloud, increasing the demand for cloud-native relational database management systems to ensure data is always available and can be accessed at the lowest possible latency.

Enterprises and startups in need of increased flexibility turn to YugabyteDB for its PostgreSQL-compatibility and out-of-the-box support for multi-cloud deployments, enabling them to experience the full benefits of true cloud elasticity.

"Several different trends are intersecting in the enterprise—the exponential growth of data, the acceleration of digital transformation, and the move to the cloud — forcing organisations to rethink how they manage their data and creating an opportunity for organisations like Yugabyte," said Ravi Mhatre, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

"With its unique combination of advanced RDBMS features, high availability, horizontal scalability, and ability to distribute data anywhere in the world, YugabyteDB is already the beating heart of many mission-critical global applications and will soon underpin many more. We're excited for this next stage of the company's growth," he added.

The funding will also be used to further accelerate enterprise adoption of Yugabyte’s commercial products.

Yugabyte Platform is a self-managed private database-as-a-service offering available on any public, private, or hybrid cloud or Kubernetes infrastructure and Yugabyte Cloud, a fully-managed database service currently available on AWS and Google Cloud, have seen broad adoption in the past 12 months.