Cockroach Labs Raises $160M At $2B Valuation

Cockroach Labs has raised $160 million in a new round of funding, bringing its valuation to $2 billion.

Altimeter Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors BOND, Benchmark, FirstMark, GV, Tiger Global Management and Index Ventures. New investors Lone Pine Capital and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the round.

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 “As business continues to move to the cloud, a new set of technologies has emerged as the foundation for how all software will run in this era of cloud computing,” Kevin Wang of Altimeter Capital said in a statement. “Cockroach Labs has quickly become the cornerstone database for all transactional workloads by offering a disruptive leap forward in scalability, reliability, and performance. Cockroach is proving to be a key piece of the multi-cloud reference architecture of the future.”

Cockroach Labs is behind Cockroach DB, which helps companies move transactional data to the cloud and manage it there. Its cloud-native SQL database is used by companies like Equifax, Bose and Comcast.

The new round of funding comes less than a year after the company last raised money. Cockroach Labs last raised an $86.6 million Series D in May 2020. The company’s total funding now comes out to about $355 million.

“It’s quite a remarkable growth in the business and growth in the valuation,” CEO Spencer Kimball said in an interview with Crunchbase News. “I think a lot of what’s driving that is people are realizing that data management is an extraordinary part of the journey of the cloud that’s been underway over the past decade.” 

The most recent fundraise and its Series D round in May 2020 were more like opportunistic raises, according to Kimball, rather than a need for the funding. The new money will be used to accelerate product engineering and the company’s marketing and sales efforts.

The company has more than doubled its revenue and customers over the past year, Cockroach Labs said in a statement. Less than a year after the general release of the company’s cloud database as a service, more than half of its customers run their critical infrastructure on the CockroachCloud, according to the company.

The “journey of the cloud” really started about two decades ago with application data, with the second wave being analytics data, Kimball said. Now, the third wave is operational data, which is where Cockroach Labs comes in.

“The financial ledgers, every bit of our supply chain, this is traditionally the province of databases like Oracle and now that’s moving to the cloud,” Kimball said. 

While Cockroach Labs has had success in top-down sales by talking to chief information officers and the like, Kimball wants every developer to use them as well. The company wants to make some of the best capabilities of Cockroach free for developers, for example, by building out a serverless multitenant version of CockroachCloud. This way, the company can grow sales both top-down and bottom-up, Kimball said.

As for what’s next, Kimball said the company does eventually want to go public. But he’s also not ruling out another round of private funding.

The company, which is based in New York, is hiring for roles in every department.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias