FaunaDB Closes $27M Series A, Welcomes New Leadership

San Francisco-based FaunaDB on Wednesday announced its largest venture-backed round of funding to date.

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The funding will accelerate growth of the company’s data application platform interface that helps developers build company applications faster and easier on any cloud.

Madrona Venture Group led the $27 million Series A extension round of funding, with participation from ADDITION, as well as developer tools leader Tom Preston-Werner, database pioneer Roger Bamford and existing institutional investors, including CRV and Quest Ventures. With the new funds, the company has raised a total of $57 million since it was founded in 2011. Fauna’s last raise, a $25 million Series A, was three years ago.

As part of the investment, Soma Somasegar, managing director at Madrona, will join the Fauna board of directors. He said in a written statement that the company has rightly identified serverless as “the next frontier” and is building a database to cater to the new demand.

“Developers are moving en masse to serverless architectures for new applications, marking the dawn of serverless as the next tool chain for building global, hyperscale apps,” Somasegar said.

Fauna also announced new leadership, including Eric Berg as its new CEO. He was formerly the chief product officer at Okta. In addition, Microsoft veteran and former Snowflake CEO, Bob Muglia, joined Fauna as executive chair and investor. Fauna co-founder Evan Weaver will take on the role of CTO.

Berg told Crunchbase News that opportunities to create good companies come when there is a shift in the marketplace. In Fauna’s case, he saw the company trying to take advantage of an architectural shift in developers wanting to build applications in a serverless environment.

Fauna’s technology eliminates the manual effort, operational complexity and administrative costs typically associated with the use of databases. It also enables developers to set up a complete and powerful data back end in minutes.

Last year, the company gained traction being product-led and developer-first, growing its revenue by four times, Berg said. Therefore, Fauna will use the new funding to increase its research and development on that front.

“It takes a lot of R&D to start a database,” he added. “We will also be experimenting with our go-to-market strategy, emphasizing the community adoption of our product, working with subscribers to manage the usage of Fauna and to get them buying more services.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias