MemSQL raises $36M Series C round for its in-memory database platform

In-memory database platform MemSQL today announced that it has raised a $36 million Series C funding round. The round was led by new investors REV and Caffeinated Capital and existing investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Data Collective, IA Ventures and First Round Capital also participated.

MemSQL, which graduated from Y Combinator back in 2011, plays in the same real-time big data analysis market that also includes the likes of HortonWorks, Cloudera, Couchbase, SAP Hana, MongoDB and others. MemSQL co-founder Eric Frenkiel tells me that this was an oversubscribed round and noted that he believes this is unusual given the dips in valuation for some of the company’s competitors.

“The Big Data market itself is rapidly shifting to real-time processing using main memory, and software like Apache Spark, Kafka, and MemSQL are enabling businesses to create and analyze real-time streams of data,” he said. In addition, he also argued that “many Big Data companies are struggling to meet high investor expectations with an open source model, which also turns out to be pretty expensive to run.” While MemSQL offers a free version of its database, the software is not open source.

Frenkiel tells me the company’s users currently include Pinterest, Comcast, Akamai and Kellogg’s.

This new round follows the company’s $35 million Series B round from 2014 and MemSQL has now raised a total of $85 million. The company says it plans to use the new funding to “accelerate growth across the company including engineering, sales, support, and marketing.”