ScaleBase, a Newton, Mass.-based startup that helps companies keep fast-scaling databases up-and-running, today announced that it has landed $10.5 million in series B funding, led by Bain Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners, with participation from its existing investor, Cedar Fund. Having raised $4 million from Cedar in 2010, the investment brings the startup’s total funding to just under $15 million.
As scores of new web and mobile apps launch every day, increasingly companies are finding themselves working overtime to manage the intense processing requirements of big data and struggling to preserve up-time. For this reason, ScaleBase sees a big market opportunity for any company offering uninterrupted database performance solutions.
Being able to deliver realtime scalability obviously can have a big effect on application performance and has the benefit of reducing over-provisioning, which has the tendency to eat holes in the company coffers.
While it’s an auspicious problem for a company to have, exploding user bases and, in turn, significant increases in data production, require companies to move fast to scale their databases. Naturally, processing these transactions can be stressful and ridiculously challenging depending on infrastructure and available resources.
More established players had to create ad hoc, internal solutions to solve these problems, but not every company is fortunate to have the available capital that scaling demands. That’s where ScaleBase comes in. As one might expect, high-growth and increasingly active spaces like online gaming and digital media represent big market opportunities for the company.
To date, ScaleBase has attracted over 20 customers including the likes of AutoDesk, AppDynamics, Mozilla and “one of the world’s largest mobile providers who asked not to be named,” said ScaleBase founder and CTO, Doron Levari.
The other key feature of ScaleBase’s technology (and its flagship product, “Data Traffic Manager”) is that they work with a company’s existing infrastructure and therefore don’t require them to re-write their applications. Since the software solution acts as a proxy between the client and the database (whether the client is an app server, BI tool or any other database client), it can reside on site or in the cloud.
That flexibility and scalability add to the startup’s value proposition, especially in a space that’s littered with competitors. The company’s newly-hired CEO Ram Metser said that he thinks the company has appeal for high-growth businesses because many of the players in the space require a new database install, with DBAs having to reshape databases and app developers having to modify apps to fit the system. Which, in turn, just adds extra stress to the system.
To play in this space going forward, companies will have to be able to process enormous amounts of data and users instantaneously, the CEO said, and, of course, ScaleBase wants to be your go-to solution to ye olde scalability challenge.
The startup’s new CEO, Ram Metser, was the former CEO of Guardium, a database security company acquired by IBM in 2009 for $225 million.
As to the company’s new infusion of capital? Metser said that ScaleBase will use it, primarily, to grow its team and ramp up hiring. He wants to grow the company from 15 to 40 employees by this time next year.
For more, find ScaleBase at home here.