Cockroach Labs Valuation Soars to $2B with $160M Round, Signaling the Next Wave of Explosive Cloud Adoption

The accelerated funding will fuel Cockroach Labs’ rapid growth, as the industry’s most evolved database helps move transactional data to the cloud

NEW YORK, Jan. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, the leading cloud-native distributed SQL database, today announced $160 million in new funding led by Altimeter Capital with participation from new investors Greenoaks and Lone Pine, and existing investors Benchmark, BOND, FirstMark, GV, Index Ventures, and Tiger Global. This round brings Cockroach Labs’ total funding to $355 million at a valuation of $2 billion.

The funding reflects Cockroach Labs’ rapid growth and the massive potential for CockroachDB as businesses continue their move to the cloud. Transactional data — the lifeblood of a company’s operations — is now the third and most significant wave of data moving to the cloud, following the initial shift of application data and, most recently, the wholesale migration of analytical data made possible by companies like Snowflake. CockroachDB is quickly becoming the transactional database of choice for organizations both large and small. With its cloud-native, distributed SQL architecture, CockroachDB helps organizations scale fast with unmatched elasticity, survive anything through a failure-resistant architecture, and thrive everywhere with multi-cloud flexibility and the data-locking for regulatory compliance.

The events of 2020 have forced organizations to rapidly adapt to changing consumer behaviors, remote workforces, and explosive growth of digital services.  These circumstances helped accelerate Cockroach Labs’ business. With its ground-breaking architecture and a relentless focus on enabling developers to build breakthrough applications, Cockroach Labs has seen massive growth, more than doubling revenues and customers over the past year. It has also continued to build a loyal following among developers, with 19,600 Github stars and over 300 external contributors. More than half of the company’s customers run their critical applications on CockroachCloud, less than a year after the general release of the fully-managed cloud database-as-a-service. Cockroach Labs has also seen validation of its business through awards, including induction into the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation and being named as Crain’s #1 Best Places to Work in New York City for large companies.

“The story of transactional SQL workloads moving to the cloud is still largely unwritten and represents a tremendous opportunity for the next Oracle-like business to emerge. CockroachDB’s high availability, strong consistency, and low latency allows them to address the lion’s share of these relational workloads,” said Neil Mehta of Greenoaks Capital. “Cockroach Labs offers a remarkable experience. It removes much of the incremental cost of scaling, driving massive cost-savings and improving developer agility. We could not be more excited to partner with the Cockroach team.”

According to Gartner, while the cloud database management system (DBMS) is not new, the revenue growth and increased opportunity are. DBMS market revenue is currently valued at $55.4 billion and Gartner forecasts that by 2023, cloud DBMS revenue will account for 50% of the total DBMS market revenue.  And, by 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform. Cockroach Labs’ funding will be used to aggressively pursue this massive market opportunity as transactional data moves to the cloud.

“At Gigaom, we believe every business can innovate at the speed of the market. The adoption of cloud native databases is accelerating, driven by the need for organizations to drive digital business revenue and be more responsive to customers,” said Ben Book, CEO of Gigaom, the analyst firm enabling businesses to future-proof their decisions. “Cockroach Labs is at the forefront of this opportunity. They are a leading innovator, fundamentally re-shaping the way enterprises do business.”

Enterprises in areas including communications, gaming and entertainment, e-commerce and financial services are looking for a more elastically scalable, multi-cloud, modern data platform like CockroachDB.

This round of funding will facilitate Cockroach Labs’ continued investments in product development to better support its customers. Cockroach Labs’ latest innovation, a forever-free version for development and education, will soon be released in beta. Sign up here to be the first to try it.  The company is also hiring in every department —  Apply now at cockroachlabs.com/careers.

Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs is the creator of CockroachDB, the most highly evolved cloud-native, distributed SQL database on the planet. Helping companies of all sizes—and the apps they develop— to scale fast, survive anything, and thrive everywhere. CockroachDB is in use at some of the world’s largest enterprises across all industries, including Equifax, Bose, Comcast and some of the largest companies in banking, retail, and media. Headquartered in New York City, Cockroach Labs is backed by Altimeter, Benchmark, Greenoaks, GV, Firstmark, Index Ventures, Lone Pine, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, and Workbench. For more information, please visit cockroachlabs.com