As the need for new computing infrastructure tools accelerates, thanks to the demands of distributed computing and the proliferation of mobile devices, startups focused on new data management and data processing technologies are raising big rounds to propel the next generation of computing.
Couchbase, which has raised $60 million in new financing from new investors WestSummit and Accel Growth Fund, is the latest of these big database companies to build out its war chest as it looks to expand internationally and continue its research and development activities.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company joins MongoDB as one of the best capitalized startups working on operational data management.
Unlike hadoop-based vendors like Cloudera, which has raised over $1 billion in financing, to develop better performing data processing databases, Couchbase and MongoDB are tackling the problem of data management and recovery, says Couchbase chief executive Bob Wiederhold.
“You have huge numbers of simultaneous users of your applications so you’ve got huge numbers of database operations that a database needs to support,” Wiederhold says. Older database technologies are centralized and ultimately lack the same ability to scale up to meet new demand as the distributed databases like Couchbase, he says.
The new capital from WestSummit and Accel Growth will be used to expand the company’s reach in the “big data” market that now accounts for $16.1 billion in global sales, according to the analyst group IDC.
One area where Couchbase will be focusing is on the rollout of its mobile technologies, which launched in May.
The mobile database that Couchbase is now selling into the market, basically enables applications on a mobile device to work even when they’re not connected to the internet.
“Today when you run a mobile app, you’ve been frustrated by a case when you don’t have an internet connection or the internet connection is bad. There’s some cacheing that takes place, but you can’t use the functionality of the app,” Wiederhold says. “If you could store your data on your mobile device, you could get very fast response times, and then whenever you did have an internet connection you could sync your data to the cloud.”
That’s basically the functionality that the Couchbase mobile product provides. “The move to mobile is an enormous mega-trend and people are going to be developing mobile appications first… We think this mobile database is going to be one of htose
key technologies in order to build those great applications.”
Looking beyond mobile, Couchbase’s chief executive sees additional opportunities for international expansion — one reason for the addition of WestSummit, a Sino-US investment fund. Raymond Yang, a co-founder and managing partner at WestSummit, will take a seat on the Couchbase board.
Couchbase has its roots in two separate database companies, CouchOne and Membase, which merged in 2011.
The company has raised over $100 million to date from investors including Accel Partners, Mayfield Fund, North Bridge Venture Partners, Ignition Partners, and Adams Street Partners.