NEW YORK – Cockroach Labs, the company behind the leading cloud-native distributed SQL database CockroachDB, has landed $278 million in Series F funding at a valuation of $5 billion. The investment 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. This round brings Cockroach Labs’ total funding to $633 million.
The funds will be used to support Cockroach Labs’ ongoing investments in the development of their fast-growing cloud database as well as its continued customer growth and expansion into new markets.
This latest funding and significant valuation reflect Cockroach Labs’ accelerated growth and the massive opportunity for the company to become a leader in the emerging cloud database-as-a-service market. According to IDC, total database management systems software is forecast to see rapid growth over the next 5 years, reaching $104.5 billion in 2025 — one of the largest and fastest-growing categories in the software market. The rapid growth of both the database market and CockroachDB reflects a fundamental shift, as organizations across industries have transitioned to a cloud-first IT philosophy and are increasingly turning to cloud databases for new initiatives or to modernize existing systems. In addition, application development is in the midst of a shift to increasingly data-intensive applications — collecting, processing, and transacting data in real-time and at a massive scale — elevating the strategic importance of the database to the business.
With its cloud-native distributed SQL architecture, CockroachDB is quickly becoming the transactional database of choice for innovators and category leaders including Comcast,Devsisters, eBay, Mythical Games, Nubank, Norfolk Southern, Starburst Data, AllSaints, Bose, Form3. Now at over 200 customers and with tens of thousands of clusters in deployment around the world, Cockroach Labs has seen massive growth. The company says it has tripled its annual recurring revenue in the last year, seeing a 500% growth in cloud revenue in the last quarter alone as customers shifted spending to the transactional database-as-a-service. More than 50% of the company’s customers now run their applications on the CockroachDB Dedicated fully managed cloud service, and the CockroachDB Serverless beta launch has already brought well over 10,000 new users to the platform.
With 100% YoY growth in headcount, Cockroach Labs continues to expand with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Toronto plus “clusters” in Denver, Seattle, London, and other cities.
“We made our initial investment in Cockroach Labs in 2015 because we believed in the founders and their vision to build a new database from the ground up for a cloud-first world,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark. “Over the last six years, we kept our belief that an elastic, distributed database would be incredibly valuable to companies of every size. Today, these beliefs have become a reality. It is exciting to see Cockroach Labs’ strong traction in the market, and are eager to see where they go from here.”
Consumers are spending more time online than ever before and the lack of historical innovation to the database was causing pain across industries. Organizations were left grappling with how to adjust to rapidly changing consumer behaviors and demand for digital services and quickly found the bottleneck in their future growth was the database. Disruption was inevitable. For agile businesses born in the cloud, the new digital economy represents a wider global audience and rapid growth — and an explosion in app development in emerging markets like gaming and gambling. For legacy businesses like financial services and retail, it means evolve or get left behind.
“When it comes to building a platform to enable true ownership of items in video games, our technology always needs to be performant and accessible to players; there is no room for downtime or degradation when supporting multiple game titles across many studios,” said Chris Downs, Director, Site Reliability Engineering and Co-Founder at Mythical Games. “With its zero-downtime upgrades and scaling, easy to use multi-region configuration and excellent support team, CockroachDB helps us accomplish all of the above — keeping data close to the players while maintaining continual high availability and being able to scale transparently. We can focus on expanding our platform, growing the number of games using it, and providing a world-class experience to their players without having to worry about our database becoming a bottleneck. Building with CockroachDB has been a game-changer for us as our platform has grown to more than 1 million users in less than a year.”
