PlanetScale, an industry leader in scaling cloud databases, just closed a $50M Series C funding round led by Coatue. This is the company’s largest raise, bringing their total funding to $90M.
The company’s backers include Madrona Ventures, Bain Capital, and Y Combinator. With this funding, PlanetScale plans to expand its user base and further its development of cloud-native distributed data management.
PlanetScale raises $50M Series C as its enterprise database service hits general availability
PlanetScale is a multi-cloud database technology company based in San Francisco, California, that provides businesses with high-performance distributed databases. Their platform creates the performance and scalability of cloud databases without the cost or complexity. PlanetScale recently raised a $50 million Series C, led by Goldman Sachs’ Principal Strategic Investment Group and joined by Microsoft’s M12 venture fund. This round of funding will support further product development, expanding features for multi-cloud deployments and modernizing data storage for large enterprises.
PlanetScale enables customers to deploy their applications across multiple clouds and regions, giving them more control over their performance and reliability. It allows customers to define custom replication policy rules on thousands of shards to increase availability at scale; create temporal replicas of production databases to provision up to 15X more replica sets; visualize exactly how the underlying data will be replicated in the topology; achieve rapid elasticity with zero downtime even while performing infrastructure operations such as autoscaling and cluster upgrades; and access fine-grained metrics per workload at scale with no manual metrics management or log scraping involved.
The Series C funding will accelerate PlanetScale’s transition into an enterprise-level Cloud Service Provider (CSP). In addition, it will enable significant investments in modernizing their storage products through integrating new features such as high throughput storage engines for both real-time analytics and batch jobs, an in-memory cache engine for high performance applications, plus non-relational NoSQL services.
Summary of Series C round
PlanetScale has announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C funding round, led by Google Cloud and joined by existing investors Kleiner Perkins, 8VC, and GV (formerly Google Ventures). This round brings its total financing to more than $95 million.
PlanetScale enables enterprises to modernize their monolithic databases with automated operations across Kubernetes and clouds. With this new influx of capital, PlanetScale will focus on product innovation, accelerate customer growth, expand the partner ecosystem with Google Cloud, and grow its engineering and go-to-market teams.
The company plans to use this new funding to further invest in its enterprise multi-cloud database products, including Apollo™ (a horizontally scaled PostgreSQL service) and PulsarDB™ (real-time cloud data replication). Furthermore, it plans to build strategic partnerships with emerging technologies such as AI/ML infrastructure solutions. In addition, it will continue to provide customers the security, scalability and reliability they need for making critical business decisions.
Investors
PlanetScale has raised an impressive $50M in its Series C, with participation from investors such as San Francisco-based investment firm, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and other technology-focused venture capital firms.
With this round of funding, PlanetScale can expand its product offerings and scale its customer base.
Let’s look at the investors in PlanetScale’s Series C.
Lead investors
In PlanetScale’s Series C funding round, lead investors included Insight Partners, M12 (Microsoft Ventures), Green Visor Capital, Wing Venture Capital, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, and Index Ventures.
The new funding will accelerate platform product innovation and focus on helping customers shift high-volume workloads to Kubernetes without any code changes. This would enable customers to take full advantage of the speed and power of Kubernetes while creating an uncomplicated migration path.
PlanetScale also plans to expand their team of experienced cloud professionals who will work with customers in helping them transition quickly and securely on PlanetScale’s Software-as-a-Service platform with 99% availability SLAs on all major public cloud providers.
Participating investors
PlanetScale raised a $50 million Series C funding round, led by Redpoint Ventures. The additional investors include A. Capital, 8VC, Blend Ventures and Bullpen Capital, and existing investors Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.
The newly announced fund will help PlanetScale expand its platform and provide customers with automated solutions that make deploying applications easier and minimizing database operations complexity. In addition, PlanetScale will use this new capital to expand its team of engineers, researchers and data science experts, who are all devoted to helping customers deliver their mission-critical applications at scale in just a few simple steps. It will also expand its platform’s product coverage across the industry-leading public clouds and establish strategic partnerships with major public cloud vendors.
Use of Funds
PlanetScale recently announced a $50M Series C funding round led by Icon Ventures. With this new funding, PlanetScale plans to further develop their technology and continue to grow the company.
The company has not yet released any information on how exactly they will use the funds from their Series C, but let’s look at some potential ways in which they may use this money.
Expansion of product offerings
PlanetScale has announced the successful close of its Series C funding round, which raised $50 million. The funds will be used to expand upon PlanetScale’s product offerings and to further invest in its distributed, multi-cluster database technology.
The investment is led by new investor CRV, with participation from existing investors Y Combinator Continuity, Amplify Partners and Initialized Capital. The influx of fresh capital will enable PlanetScale to accelerate their growth plans and make significant investments into their platform technology, engineering teams, product development initiatives and global go-to-market activities:
- Expanding the global reach of its enterprise distributed database platform
- Enhancing the scalability and reliability capabilities within the platform
- Developing new automations for multi-cluster deployments
- Improving educational material and customer training resources
- Investing in engineering teams to further improve product performance
- Exploring innovative deployment models for enhanced reliability & scalability
Hiring of additional staff
PlanetScale’s $50 million Series C investment round has allowed us to significantly expand our staff. In addition, the funds will be used to hire various critical roles, from entry-level positions to experienced executive-level professionals.
We aim to bring on software engineers, UX designers and researchers, product managers, finance and operations specialists, marketing professionals, and customer success team members. Our new hires will help support our mission of creating highly scalable distributed database solutions that make databases easier to use in today’s world while setting us apart from other data stores.
With this funding round, we continue our commitment to expanding the engineering team with a solid base of talented individuals passionate about creating cutting-edge products and technologies at PlanetScale. In addition, we intend to identify diverse perspectives on database technologies and develop the expertise of our new hires through continued learning and growth opportunities in their roles. Ultimately, this helps us drive innovation for modern data storage solutions and better serve our customers’ needs for increased scalability and cost efficiency in their database tasks.
Impact
PlanetScale’s $50M Series C round will have an unprecedented impact on the company. From hiring more talent, to increasing resources in research and development, PlanetScale can now invest in the resources needed for the scalability of their product.
This round of funding will allow PlanetScale to expand their services, increase their reach, and create new features.
Impact on industry
The news of PlanetScale’s $50M Series C funding has been received positively by those in the technology industry. In addition to providing a sizeable infusion of cash for the company, this infusion is seen as a sign that data-driven tech companies can grow and receive substantial investments even during economic downturns.
The investment indicates faith in PlanetScale as a business and the broader shift towards data-driven decision making and innovation. With this injection of resources, their ability to push boundaries and expand their influence within the industry is expected to accelerate.
Many experts believe that this kind of large scale support for a rapidly emerging technology firm speaks volumes about AI’s potential to change how we view data processing and optimize performance. The investment is also seen as proof of PlanetScale’s commitment to leveraging data and developing new capabilities that drive customer success.
This influx of capital should enable PlanetScale to expand their offering, build ecosystems around their platform and increase customer acquisition strategies, while also helping them secure additional market share within their industry niche. Furthermore, given its positive reception within Industry circles, it will likely also attract other investments into similar areas.
Impact on customers
The recent $50M Series C funding for PlanetScale, a leader in multi-cloud databases and data management solutions, will positively impact customers. By increasing their investments in next-generation cloud native solutions and technology, PlanetScale will continue building out their suite of data management services to provide customers with the best possible experience.
With expanding their customer base and adding more talent to its already impressive engineering team, PlanetScale can now enable even bigger customers to easily migrate their applications and databases across various cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. By accelerating innovation through added investments, PlanetScale will make it even easier for customers to take advantage of larger multi-cloud deployments that can save money in the long run. Customers will also benefit from improved services such as disaster recovery solutions designed to automatically migrate data when needed.
Overall, this series C funding is a huge success for PlanetScale and its customer base — it signals increased commitment from investors and the development team. The funds will also help accelerate growth internally in terms of local talent acquisition and externally as PlanetScale continues expanding its offerings into larger customer bases across multiple geographies. In addition, through these investments, users can expect an improved product offering that’s focused on providing an even better cloud experience with greater cost savings potential over time.
Future Plans
PlanetScale’s $50M Series C round was a resounding success, adding to their already impressive list of venture capital partners. With the newfound capital and industry support, PlanetScale is already looking towards the future and formulating plans to continue their success.
They have begun to consider ways to optimize their existing products and services and develop possible new ones. So let’s take a closer look at their plans moving forward.
Short-term goals
PlanetScale, an open-source database as a service (DBaaS) platform for running distributed applications at scale, has raised a $50M Series C round led by Insight Partners. The company already had backing from notable venture capital firms like A16Z and GV, formerly Google Ventures. The funding brings the total capital invested in the company to around $90M.
This funding will allow PlanetScale to continue expanding its global footprints. It will enable customers to run their workloads at any cloud or on-premise locations and gain economies of scale through a single platform. Aside from international growth, PlanetScale plans to increase its product portfolio and partner ecosystem to build out its database as a service (DBaaS) solution.
The short-term goals of this new funding include product expansion over the next 3 years, supporting their partners to enable their customers with the flexibility they need when it comes to scaling databases across multiple clouds and on-premise data centers; expanding sales presence globally; and dedicated investment into research and development for ongoing platform advancement. Through these goals, PlanetScale will position itself as the go-to choice for enterprise companies looking for reliable data scalability at any location.
Long-term goals
PlanetScale, provider of a cloud-native and multi-cloud database as a service, has announced that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding from investors such as GV (formerly Google Ventures), Index Ventures, Mango Capital and Y Combinator.
The company aims to use the funding to build its infrastructure and advance its long-term goals of making cloud databases easier to use and manage.
With the new funding, PlanetScale plans to expand its team, strengthen its engineering infrastructure, and launch new products to make database administration faster and less expensive. The company also plans on building out existing solutions, such as Delphix Kubernetes Storage (DKS), so that customers can quickly implement complex multi-cloud strategies without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Additionally, PlanetScale is looking to invest in open source projects to help developers utilize the latest technologies in their applications. This includes supporting initiatives related to distributed databases, distributed systems, serverless computing and more — all built with an intent for flexibility since multi-cloud databases have become increasingly important for digital transformation efforts.
PlanetScale believes that this capital injection will help accelerate innovation in the field of databases from storing static data to streaming analytics applications.
tags = PlanetScale, world’s most advanced serverless MySQL platform, $50M, enterprise database service, Kleiner Perkins, Vitess, planetscale mysql series kleiner perkins 105mlardinoistechcrunch, YouTube, GitHub, New Relic, Slack, MyFitnessPal
