PlanetScale, the company behind the open-source Vitess database clustering system for MySQL that was first developed at YouTube, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Insight Partners, with participation from a16z and SignalFire. With this, the company has now raised a total of $55 million, according to Crunchbase.
Today’s announcement comes only a few weeks after PlanetScale launched its new hosted database platform, also dubbed PlanetScale. The company had previously offered a hosted version of Vitess, but with this new service, it is going a step further and offering what it calls a “developer-first database” that abstracts away all of the infrastructures to ensure that developers won’t have to think about cloud zones, cluster sizes and other details.
Indeed, PlanetScale CEO and co-founder Jiten Vaidya was quite open about the limitations of this earlier product. “What we had built last year was pretty much hosted Vitess, which was no different than how a lot of cloud providers today give you databases,” he said. “So none of this ease of use, none of this elegance, none of these state-of-the-art experiences that the developers want and expect today, we had built into our product.”
But a few months ago, the company brought on former GitHub VP of Engineering Sam Lambert as its Chief Product Officer. Vaidya noted that Lambert brought a lot of developer empathy to PlanetScale and helped it launch this new product.
“People come to you because they’re not database experts, but they have data, they have problems,” Lambert said. “And too many companies, especially in the database world, do not think about the daily lives of their users like we do. They don’t think about the complete journey of what the user is actually trying to do, which is to provide value to their customers. They’re just very impressed with themselves for storing and retrieving data. And it’s like, yep, we’ve been doing that. We’ve been doing that since the 60s. Can we do something else now?”
The company’s users today include the likes of Slack, Figma, GitHub and Square, so it’s clearly delivering value to a lot of users. As Lambert noted, PlanetScale aims to offer them a product that is simple and easy to use. “Just because it is simple and easy to use, and beautiful, honestly — like just beautiful, well-designed tooling — it doesn’t mean it’s inferior. It doesn’t mean it’s missing anything. It means the others are missing the poetry and the additional elements of beauty that you can add to infrastructure products,” he said.
PlanetScale plans to use the new funding to scale its team globally and accelerate the adoption of its platform. Insight Partners Managing Director Nikhil Sachdev will join the company’s board, with the firm’s Managing Director Praveen Akkiraju also joining as a board observer.
“PlanetScale is setting a new bar for simplicity, performance and scalability for cloud-based databases in the serverless era,” said Sachdev. “The developer experience for databases has been painful for too long. PlanetScale is breaking that chain, solving longstanding problems related to scalability and reliability in an extremely elegant, tasteful, and useful way.”
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