QuestDB launches ‘database-as-a-service’ with $12M investment

On Wednesday, QuestDB announced a $12 million investment in its series A round to support expanding the features of its time-series database while also launching a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for customers who want to use the database without managing servers. The investment suggests deeper interest in using the so-called time-series databases, which are tuned for absorbing a steady stream of data from sensors or other relentless sources.

“The idea is to build features to unlock even more adoption to make sure that even more companies can get started with the product and use it at scale,” Nicolas Hourcard, the CEO and cofounder of QuestDB, explained in a video interview with VentureBeat.

The company already bills QuestDB as the “fastest open source, time-series database.” Hourcard explains that one of their first moves will be to simplify cluster management, so the database can be run in parallel over a cluster or pod of instances to spread out the workload for injection. Offering rock-solid performance in the face of unending data streams is key.

“All the sensors are just sending this data all the time, non-stop,” said Hourcard. “That’s really one critical thing [for time-series databases]. The load is constant. So if there’s one blip in terms of performance at some point, it’s not reliable. Say you pause for one minute, and you lose all this data forever. It’s gone, right? So that’s where sort of time-series performance is super, super important.”

After that, QuestDB wants to pursue expanding the options for charting and analysis. They also want to integrate the database with Python, so users will be able to work directly with the data using their favorite Python libraries without exporting the data from QuestDB. Instead of waiting for the data to be imported into a separate Python process, Hourcard sketched out a vision of a system where the query results would arrive immediately in a Python data frame ready for analysis.

The company which took part in Y-Combinator’s S20 batch announced that much of the new funding comes from 468 Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and open source founders such as Tom Preston-Werner, cofounder at GitHub, Sebastien Pahl, cofounder at Docker, Alexis Ohanian, cofounder at Reddit, Mirko Novakovic cofounder at Instana, Andrey Alekseev, cofounder at NGINX, and Tobi Knaup, the CEO at D2iQ, as well as top industry executives Michael Li, VP Data at Coinbase, and Grace Francisco, VP Developer Relations at Cisco.