The enterprise that built the serverless, streamlined data analytics platform based on open source database DuckDB, MotherDuck, is announcing a recent funding milestone of $47.5 million. The initial Series A funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, garnered $35 million, further compounded with a $12.5 million seed round led by Redpoint—resulting in a total valuation of $175 million for the company.
“The fact is, ‘Big Data’ is dead; the simplicity and the ease of making sense of your data is a lot more important than its size,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO and co-founder of MotherDuck. “Laptops today are faster than a data warehouse. With advances in hardware, distributed computation is no longer necessary for most workloads. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience. We are taking the power of DuckDB and combining it with serverless analytics to help scale up and scale down with ease.”
The recent funding will aid MotherDuck in building out their engineering team and incorporating a go-to-market function, which will fuel the development of a cloud analytics platform for enhanced DuckDB capabilities. Ultimately, the funds will be dedicated toward bringing this technology to a wide expanse of people, bringing about a plethora of new use cases to be addressed with extreme efficiency and performance, according to MotherDuck. The companies are keen to note that DuckDB will maintain its status as a vehicle for conducting academic research, despite the collaboration.
MotherDuck represents a coalition of former leaders of a variety of accomplished enterprises, such as Snowflake and AWS, led by BigQuery founding engineer, Jordan Tigani. Their extensive knowledge surrounding data was immediately put to use; the team pointed toward misrepresentation of workloads as “big data,” which lacked nuance in its meaning.
Enter DuckDB—the north star for the team at MotherDuck—analogous to SQLite for analytics workloads; the solution can run everywhere, execute analytical queries based on academic research quickly, and do so without having to preload query data. When compounded with a cloud analytics platform, DuckDB can leverage both the agility and speed of its in-process database with the collaboration and scalability of the cloud.
“DuckDB and DuckDB Labs have been fortunate to have hundreds of contributors around the world. We look forward to the continued growth and adoption that partnering with MotherDuck will bring,” said Dr. Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB. “Thanks to the MotherDuck team, we are able to focus our efforts on independent innovation of the DuckDB core platform and growth of the open source community.”
To learn more about this funding milestone, please visit https://motherduck.com/.