Citus Data, which provides solutions to scale out PostgreSQL for real-time big data, has secured $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation by previous Citus Data investors including Data Collective and Vaizra Investments. Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and previously chief technology officer at Hortonworks, will join the Citus Data board of directors. The company says the funding round will be used to grow the Citus Data development team and expand its sales and marketing efforts.
Citus Data powers the relational database, the mainstay of database infrastructure, to scale across hundreds of billions of events for real-time workloads. Instead of building the distributed database from scratch, the CitusDB database leverages the maturity and performance of the PostgreSQL database to enable companies who are already familiar with relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle to scale to billions of data points, without starting or hiring from scratch; simplify complex big data architectures that require combining non-relational technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL, and relational databases; and bridge the gap between operational and analytics databases for real-time big data use cases such as customer-facing analytics dashboards and online reporting.
A PDF of the Fall 2015 issue of Big Data Quarterly magazine is available for download now. To become a subscriber to the print magazine, go to www.dbta.com/BigDataQuarterly/Subscribe.aspx.
The new funding round is a sign of the significant market opportunity for Citus Data and the need for a simple way to build real-time big data applications cost-effectively, said Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data. “With the ever increasing growth rate of data and strong PostgreSQL adoption, we are in a great position to provide unique solutions for managing and analyzing big data. CitusDB will become a preferred alternative over current technologies in many use cases."
Having an elastically scalable, real-time relational database that runs on commodity machines is important to any modern data infrastructure, whether in the public, private or hybrid cloud, according to the vendor. Unlike earlier approaches that create a fork of the underlying database for offline analytics, CitusDB tackles both real-time mixed analytic and short-request workloads simultaneously. It is also unique, the company says, as a distributed database that always stays current with the latest version of the underlying project, allowing its users to leverage the extensible and open PostgreSQL ecosystem.
"This funding round reflects the significant market opportunity for Citus Data," said Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data. "Customers want a simple way to build real-time big data applications, without sacrificing relational power - and we enable them to do that without breaking the bank. With the ever increasing growth rate of data and strong PostgreSQL adoption, we are in a great position to provide unique solutions for managing and analyzing big data. CitusDB will become a preferred alternative over current technologies in many use cases."
More information is available about Citus Data.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.