Database optimization startup Silk raises $55M

Silk, a platform designed to improve database performance, today announced it has raised $55 million in a series B funding round led by S Capital. The company says the funds will be used to support its sales and marketing operations and expand its engineering team as the demand for cloud environments rises in the wake of the pandemic.

As companies increasingly move their workloads to the cloud, stable cloud infrastructure is essential. Seventy percent of companies now use more than one database in their stack, according to Redgate. And in a recent Gleanster survey, respondents said databases are the No. 1 source of app performance issues.

Silk, which was founded in 2008 by CEO Dani Golan, Moshe Selfin, and Ofir Dubovi, enables customers to scale databases on-demand while delivering ostensibly better performance compared with conventional setups. The platform automatically detects and removes duplicate data, mitigating gaps between data and applying compression to bridge silos between clouds and on-premise servers.

Golan claims the platform makes cloud environments run up to 10 times faster and the entire app stack more resilient to malfunctions. “The cloud vendors are now beginning the fight over customers’ databases and other mission-critical ‘crown jewels.’ To win this fight, they need to guarantee that customers will meet their own end users’ service-level agreements by enabling prime scalability and performance of their mission-critical applications,” he added. “Having this capital allows us to bring the vision-accelerated cloud adoption to a wider audience.”

Database optimization

Silk, which sits between cloud environments and a customer’s databases, allocates cloud capacity to deliver automatic provisioning and clones data for free, letting companies create test environments without spending or slowing workload. The platform’s machine learning-powered dashboard shows real-time metrics and allows admins to scale up or down on the fly, as well as viewing the features and data they’re using.

Cloud observability and management remains a major challenge in the enterprise. In a Pepperdata report,  64% of respondents said cost management and containment was their biggest concern when it came to running cloud big data technologies and applications. Moreover, a majority of respondents said optimizing current cloud resources was their highest-priority big data cloud initiative.

Silk counts Payoneer, Priceline, Cisco, and Telefonica among its customers and has partnered with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform to sell its technology and services. To date, the Needham, Massachusetts-based company has raised over $294 million in venture capital, including a $75 million series F round led by CIRTech Fund and Waterwood Group that closed in January 2017.

The most recent funding round included participation from Sequoia Capital, Pitango, Globespan, Ibex, Vintage, Clal Insurance, Bank HaPoalim, Meitav Dash, and Menora Mivtachim.