PlanetScale earns $ 50 million in Series C financing when its enterprise database service becomes publicly available

PlanetScale, a serverless database business formed by the authors of the Vites open source project that runs YouTube, has acquired $ 50 million in a Series C fundraising round led by Kleiner Perkins. Existing investors a16z, SignalFire and Insight Partners, as well as GitHub's former CEO and co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Lattice CEO and founder Jack Altman, and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, participated in this round. The company has already raised $ 105 million in total capital, including a $ 30 million Series B fundraising round announced just five months ago.

In addition, the company stated today that its host-based enterprise platform is now widely available. Although its service has only been offered as a private beta since launching in May 2021, the company's customers include YouTube, GitHub, New Relic, Slack, MyFitnessPal, Square and Affirm. "We have popular sites - the top 4,000 sites - that have already been converted to PlanetScale and are currently managed on PlanetScale - in beta," said PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert. "You can not keep people away from it." effect on them. "

Lambert, who was previously VP of Engineering at GitHub, was named CEO of PlanetScale in July after being the company's product manager for nine months. He replaced co-founder Jiten Vaidya, who became head of strategy and continues on the company's board.

PlanetScale, according to Lambert, is expanding rapidly, with the number of employees having quadrupled in the last six months. "We are now referred to as standard serverless databases, especially if you use systems such as Netlify and Vercel." Serverless is expanding as a segment of the market, but it was developed in less sophisticated sectors [...] and there were some people who put together databases for the serverless world. "But we showed up - and I think we offered something completely new: the database that served as the backend for YouTube.com, the world's second largest site, and we took it into a serverless environment," Lambert explained.

Transaction databases, such as PlanetScale, are "the premium market opportunity in all infrastructure," according to Kleiner Perkin's partner Bucky Moore. Although the big cloud providers make billions of dollars on these services, investors have been hesitant. "To be honest, many investors have been wary of competing with cloud providers on this axis because it is a company that is so close and dear to their heart and strategy." added Moore. "But how I think about it is completely different. You have these two megatrends in the requirement to provide web-sized software to global user populations, which the public cloud naturally simplifies considerably. At the same time, they I have not done anything to innovate how to manage the database part of this, and, of course,

At the same time, Lambert claims that serverless is finally reaching the stage where it can deliver on many of the cloud's first promises. "Eventually, the cloud basically switched to 'Well, you're not deploying servers anymore.' probably.' I think serverless is going and getting traction.  It's going at such a furious pace.  And it's contributing to human growth.  It's the result of a company with five people worth over a billion dollars simply to tie these things together. "

While PlanetScale is based on open source projects such as MySQL and Vitess, Lambert and Moore were not worried that the big cloud providers would steal the code and create their own competitors.

"One thing that clouds cannot clone is taste," Lambert said (and it is worth noting that few individuals give as much fire and passion to a database conversation as Lambert). "That's true, is not it?" Take a look at the license argument, or license war, that is now taking place. Due to concerns that the clouds would just pick up their tools, many, many companies and database companies are hiding behind BSL licenses. We are not afraid that people will be able to take our taste, we are not afraid. I was on GitHub when large companies started and then shut down their GitHub competitor. And it's because of our enormous ability to create things that, through beauty, design and incredible taste, resonate emotionally with others. [...] We do not

Regarding the company's future goals, Lambert said that PlanetScale has just built the framework for its vision so far. According to him, the company has only shown about 10% of what Vitess can, but the team needed to implement the basics, such as login systems and audit logs, before it could start on these next steps (but with database branching, it has already launched a number of highly innovative features as well). According to the PlanetScale team, most of the work in the database industry has revolved around taking jobs outside the database and managing data outside the database. But if you have a solid and highly scalable system, like Vitess, you can simplify your architecture and eventually incorporate many of the primitives established outside the database systems back into them.

With today's GA release, the company now delivers a new database import feature that allows users to easily migrate any MySQL database to PlanetScale with a few clicks. This should allow new customers to test the service with their own data before making the entire transfer. The service is now integrated with the new Prisma Data Platform, which allows developers to build PlanetScale databases in Prisma.