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March 3, 2021

Yugabyte Raises More Funds, Announces Acquisition

Yugabyte, the distributed SQL database vendor, closed its second funding round in the last nine months while expanding its presence in the Asia Pacific region with an acquisition.

The five-year-old startup announced a $48 million funding round on Wednesday (March 3), bringing its funding total to $103 million. The latest round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Dell Technologies Capital, Eight Partners VC, Greenspring Partners and Wipro Ventures.

The funding will be used to support “aggressive expansion plans” that include a doubling of staff during 2021. The expansion plans include integrating personnel from Falarica Analytics, Pune, India, which offers cloud-based interactive analytics services, including a query platform. Neeraj Kumar, who co-founded Falarica in August 2020, is a former principal architect and engineering director at Tibco Software.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Yugabyte did say the deal would aid its recruitment efforts in the Asia Pacific region.

Yugabyte also reported accelerating enterprise adoption of its open source database, especially among e-commerce, financial services and telecommunications customers requiring a distributed database capable of handling high-volume transactions. It’s roster of customers includes high-frequency stock trader Hudson River Trading and the grocery store chain Kroger (NYSE: KR).

“This new round of funding will position Yugabyte to meet this increased enterprise demand and power our global expansion into key markets,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Yugabyte co-founder and president.

The company said enterprise demand has been driven by the work-from-home transition that has increased use of cloud-native relational database management systems. “You need to run this as a distributed database across nodes that’s spanning zones or regions,” Muthukkaruppan told Datanami last summer

Yugabyte also promotes the compatibility of its SQL database with PostgreSQL platforms along with its “permissive” Apache 2.0 licensing framework.

It also cites growing corporate adoption of cloud-native application frameworks such as Spring and the GraphQL data-access API.

The startup said it would also use its new funding to boost enterprise adoption of its self-managed private database service running on private, public or hybrid clouds along with Kubernetes infrastructure. The managed cloud database service is available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

Yugabyte released the latest version of its flagship distributed SQL database in February. The upgrade targets scaling and high availability of enterprise workloads along with new data security features.

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