Cockroach Labs raises $27 million and unveils an enterprise version of its open source database for developers

Cockroach Labs, which provides an open source database for developers, announced today the launch of an enterprise offering, as well as funding of $27 million. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with Benchmark Capital, FirstMark Capital, GV, and Index Ventures returning as investors.

“We are offering what is going to become the new standard — ‘multi-active availability’,” wrote Cockroach Labs’ founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball, in an email to VentureBeat. “It means multiple servers have replicas of your data, and there are new protections in place to ensure that in the event of failover, applications built on top of the database will not experience potentially damaging inconsistencies.” The startup’s name is a tribute to a cockroach’s resiliency.

Kimball argues that while databases offered by private clouds like Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services (AWS) may offer similar features, Cockroach Labs’ product has the advantage of flexibly spanning different clouds in hybrid deployments and migrating between clouds without downtime. “This means no vendor lock-in, which is a dangerous problem when you’re entrusting all of your data to one vendor,” he wrote in an email to VentureBeat.

CockroachDB Enterprise is available starting today through a paid subscription model for customers with larger data sets. The subscription includes incremental backup/restore and support, and the startup claims to already have notable customers in production, including Baidu.

Cockroach Labs will use today’s funding to further develop its products, increase customer support, and make additional hires. Founded in 2015, the New York City-based startup has 30 employees and has raised a total of $53.5 million to date.