SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fauna Inc., founded by the team that scaled Twitter, has completed a $25M Series A round from top tier VC firms and strategic investors with large footprints in the financial services and consumer Internet industries.
Capital One Growth Ventures, the venture capital arm of the financial-services giant, joined GV (formerly Google Ventures), Point72 Ventures, Afore Capital and Costanoa Ventures in the $25M Series A round – the largest-ever for an operational database company. Also participating in this round were consumer Internet conglomerates LINE, NHN and Naver, motivated by a growing need for Fauna’s product offerings within their respective industries.
FaunaDB is a NoSQL database for mission critical data. It is the only database on the market built from the ground up to combine a high performance distributed transactional query engine with operational simplicity, global scalability and policy-based security. FaunaDB is infrastructure agnostic and is available today for use on-premises as well as a managed cloud service.
“Given Capital One’s leading technology approach, we were eager to collaborate with Fauna and explore the unique and forward-thinking database for the modern enterprise,” said Venkatesh Seetharam, partner with Capital One Growth Ventures. “Fauna equips developers at large enterprises, including banking, with the capabilities to build core services, tools, and other microservices quickly, without sacrificing business needs such as transactionality. We’re looking forward to working alongside Fauna as an investor and being part of the company’s ongoing evolution of the database and cloud industries.”
FaunaDB has a wide range of applications across many industries, from financial services firms that demand ACID-compliant databases for their massive amount of transactions to video game developers. FaunaDB is in active use at global leaders such as NVIDIA, as well as small teams building complex mobile products with hundreds of teams using the FaunaDB Cloud.
“Enterprises need a modern database that is as safe as traditional SQL systems while offering the flexibility of the more recent NoSQL trend,” said Evan Weaver, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fauna.
Weaver, former Director of Infrastructure at Twitter, and Matt Freels, who was also with the groundbreaking social media platform, built a scalable, mission-critical data service to eliminate the infamous “Fail Whale” screen icon that many users experienced during the first several years of Twitter. Several other former Twitter employees have also joined Fauna.
“Fauna is the transactional database for the 21st century – globally distributed and operationally simple, with all the best qualities of NoSQL, while maintaining the strong consistency and performance required to support the financial services industry,” said Daniel Gwak, co-head of AI Investments at Point72 Ventures. “Evan and his team of world-class technologists know first-hand what goes bump when scaling massively distributed transactional systems from their experience building Twitter, and we are excited to be partnering with Fauna.”
FaunaDB is designed for all types of workloads, large or small, and run on commodity hardware in private data centers, leading public cloud environments or a combination of the two.
“Traditional data infrastructure can’t serve the modern-day needs of global enterprises, especially companies in regulated industries,” said Anamitra Banerji, managing director at Afore Capital. “At Twitter, the Fauna team faced those problems from the outset and had to invent a new data infrastructure from the ground up. Now, Fauna is making the technology available to help any enterprise.”
Fauna launched in 2012 and has raised $29.5 million, including the $25 million Series A Round.
“We raised a large Series A round so that we can scale the company to match the size of the opportunity,” Weaver said. “We’re excited to use these new resources to continue building a database – and company – to last. Operational databases can be lifetime commitments for customers and we’re in it for the long haul.”
About Fauna
Fauna is the company behind FaunaDB, FaunaDB is a transactional NoSQL database that guarantees data correctness in global environments without operational complexity. Legacy databases create a dilemma: choose scale, and productivity suffers. Choose productivity, and scale and correctness suffer. Scalable, ACID-compliant, multi-cloud, and highly available, FaunaDB is designed for mission-critical systems in the 21st century and beyond. For more information or to sign up, please visit www.fauna.com.
