Crate.io, developer of the open source CrateDB SQL database, has raised $1.5 million from Sunstone and Draper Esprit.
CrateDB, which makes real time SQL queries on large data sets super simple, also announced its general availability. It is already in use by thousands of developers. Through its distributed real time SQL engine and a massively parallel shared nothing architecture, it enables tens of thousands of concurrent real time queries, even while dealing with a massive inflow of data, problems that today’s software only partially solves.
CrateDB’s modern architecture integrates powerful distributed search into the core of a state-of-the-art database and lets developers store tabular data, unstructured records and binary objects while enabling real-time SQL queries and fulltext search.
Jodok Batlogg, Crate.io CTO, said: “We have worked with very large data sets for many years. It became crystal clear that a modern distributed database architecture that can be accessed through SQL is required” said. “We also focused on extreme simplicity to run a highly available data store – something that developers have wanted for a very long time and never received – until now.”
Crate.io was founded in 2013 by Mr Batlogg alongside co-founders Christian Lutz and Bernd Dorn, founding contributors to Zope and Plone. It is based in San Francisco, Austria, and Berlin.
Hubert Łępicki, of Amberbit, a development house, said his company turned to CrateDB to store millions of events after they “ran into speed problems with traditional technology”. “Now queries work superfast.”
Nikolaj Nyholm, a Partner at Sunstone, said: “Crate is a simple, yet powerful, datastore which removes many of the pipes and glue of high-performance web and enterprise applications. This has been affirmed by the scores of developers who are now engaging as users and by the contributors to Crate.” Crate is Sunstone’s third open source developer software investment.
Gil Dibner, a Partner at Draper Esprit, said: “Just like Software as a Service broke the on-premise software installation paradigm with the no-software message, it is about time that the tech industry goes for massively scalable and simple data stores, a ‘no-database-administration’ approach. As more and more big data applications are deployed, the need for an easy to scale data store like CrateDB’s becomes obvious”.
The Crate investment is Mr Dibner’s first since joining Draper Esprit.
Mr Nyholm and Mr Dibner will join the Crate Board of Directors.
CrateDB is open source and the company offers an enterprise version.