5 ms·

2021 in Database Startups: Gold Rush

86 points by ashvardanian 5y ago

sona_zevit 5y ago
It has been really an amazing year for startup DB providers in terms of the raised capital but we are yet to see the yield as users…
m_ke 5y ago
It has been a gold rush for all startups, especially late stage. (see: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/11/articles/body/20211127_fnc308.png https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/11...) I wouldn't use valuations as a signal of traction.
cletus 5y ago
Two thoughts spring to mind. The first is RethinkDB [1], which was a darling for awhile but couldn't seem to find a business model. I really wonder if it came later how much money it could've raised. There were claims made that the cloud killed RethinkDB. This past year seems to fly in the face of that theory. The second is: is this just database "success" (as measured by funding rounds and valuations) or is this just the general case with all startups? I honestly don't know. Still, I wasn't aware of all these players and it was a good post so thanks for that. [1]: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/
- ashvardanian 5y ago
  Thanks a lot! I have never worked with RethinkDB specifically, but I can assure you - it's only one of many names in the DBMS graveyard. Most have probably died because of inability to monetize open-source software. For DBMS startups, which don't offer an order of magnitude improvements, the problem is convincing any one to replace a fundamental piece of infrastructure. For disruptive startups the problem is even bigger. As soon as you go open-source, all of your competitive technological advantage is gone.
geophile 5y ago
Having been in or associated with many database startups, I would not invest in one. You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or company depends. in such a situation, you want boring technology that just works. Hard to imagine a new feature, or performance win, that justifies the vastly increased risk of obtaining it.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with this - there have been many postgres features over the past ~10 years that got me excited, some of the highlights that immediately spring to mind: - JSON / jsonb - improved partitioning support - identity columns I agree that I wouldn't want to trust a new entrant to the space unless it was subject to rigorous testing, eg https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > postgres Postgres has the advantage that it's still open-source, can be ran locally and self-hosted (and has a healthy ecosystem of managed providers) and won't go away anytime soon. None of these are true for all these new DB startups.
  - geophile 5y ago
    Doing well on the Jepsen tests is a very good sign. But it isn't anywhere near enough. Other things to consider: - The product has bugs not addressed by Jepsen. - Performance is inadequate. - The optimizer is immature, and you find yourself struggling to understand and work around its limitations. - Replication is missing or doesn't work well enough. - There is absolutely no substitute for N years of real-world experience, no matter how rigorous the company's testing. - Impossibility of finding people already familiar with the product, because they are all employed by the vendor. - Even aside from product issues, is the company profitable? If not, how long is it going to be in existence?
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
JCM9 5y ago
The VC market is super frothy at the moment. That drives up valuations in the short term and results in a very easy time to raise capital (aka Gold Rush). However what follows is a period where the market will turn the screws really hard on companies to show they have a viable and economically justifiable business or they’ll get washed out real quick. We’re not in a bubble like dot com but it will get very uncomfortable for companies that don’t have a clear path to self-sustaining economics.
- ashvardanian 5y ago
  Maybe not exactly the same bubble, but it's hard not to make parallels. Pets.com, one of the most comical cases of 2000s, was worth $400M at peak. When Chewy.com went public, they dwarfed that number with a new record of $13B. The analogy was so obvious, that CNBC wrote an article on that [1]. After that $CHWY managed to go as high as $118/share, translating into a market cap of roughly $50 Billion in December 2021. Now they are trading at about half that price. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/opinion-chewy-is-no-petscom.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/opinion-chewy-is-no-petscom....
  - joshgel 5y ago
    Isn’t the fact that they got cut in half (and other examples, peloton for example) evidence that this isn’t a bubble. There are companies that are exploding in value, yes, but also companies just getting crushed left and right. If you’re growing, your value is very high, but miss your targets and boom, bye bye froth.
    - Traster 5y ago
      Isn't what you're describing stage 4 of a bubble - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/10/5-steps-of-a-bubble.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/10/5-steps-of-a...
zitterbewegung 5y ago
I think that open source database startups (or even ones that do data management like Elasticsearch) a big problem (other than finding traction obviously ). One is if you release your source code it’s very easy for someone else to just copy the straight forward business model of selling it as SaaS. The second one would be keeping your promises or even competing entrenched databases. Even when you have gotten this far a way that you can exit is to get one enterprise customer convinced to use it so badly they must acquirer you. The biggest lie I have seen across databases is actual time travel for your data. Or in other words given a date and time in the past it gives you what the data was then.
- lumost 5y ago
  > The biggest lie I have seen across databases is actual time travel for your data. Or in other words given a date and time in the past it gives you what the data was then. I worked at a company where we built this for our internal HBase clusters. Given any timestamp (or even better a commit ID) we could restore the cluster to that point in time. This was done through a combination of backing up the store files + write ahead logs. As I recall we had a retention limit for how much time we could do this for - but they were high enough for all of the "oh crap" moments.
  - pengaru 5y ago
    That seems like it would burn a lot of space on store file snapshots to replay the relevant WAL atop. Did they integrate with an underlying filesystem's snapshotting feature to make the store file snapshots differentials, or was that also implemented in the database? Or just threw space at the problem?
- bushbaba 5y ago
  While not a database. Apache iceberg has the time travel functionality for read heavy big data analytics, among other optimizations.
- Traster 5y ago
  On the business model side of things, I think the most important thing to think about is the threat of the cloud providers. In the same way that MSFT were able to take most of the profits from the 90s/00s PC business, and Apple were able to take most of the profits from the appstore, and Amazon takes most of the profits from the Amazon market place, in the same way the cloud providers are realistically going to take the vast majority of the profits from running your DB in the cloud. Elasticsearch has exactly this problem. If they're lucky, Amazon will buy them. If they're unlucky Amazon will just steal their tech and take the profits (some would argue this already happened). They're by and large living in someone elses ecosystem.
therealdrag0 5y ago
Anyone know about RavenDB? Came across them years ago. Seems neat, but never heard of anyone using them. Also has been a for profit company for a while but not sure if they use venture or self sustaining
- redwood 5y ago
  Seemed like they had some traction in MSFT shops 5-6 years ago, guessing they hit some synergies in the .NET ecosystem?
  - jeremycarter 5y ago
    Yeah a lot of .NET shops backed raven due to it's integration with LINQ at the time. It was actually very powerful and feature rich. Haven't touched raven in 8 years, although I have checked out their time series functionality.
titanomachy 5y ago
This is the first I’m hearing of Unum. Their benchmarks are impressive. I’ve often wondered how much we are held back in performance by all the layers of abstraction on data storage (db, os, filesystem, disk layout) and it seems they’re able to significantly beat the incumbents, partly by collapsing down the layers. I’m not sure what BLAS has to do with a key-value store.
- ashvardanian 5y ago
  > it seems they’re able to significantly beat the incumbents, partly by collapsing down the layers. Hahaha, thanks for the kind words! Not sure if I could describe our methodology better)) We originally come from and hope to continue working on AGI technologies (Artificial General Intelligence). Writing a key-value store and, subsequently, a DBMS came out of necessity, as other solutions seemed too bulky, slow, outdated and expensive. So we invested time into building UnumDB for internal use, but after first benchmarks, it was clear, that this must be available to broader audience. We will polish it in the next couple of months and make it deployable in public clouds, just like other DBMS brands. Now DBMS is our central focus, but with essential R&D out of the way, we will rebalance our priorities and continue working on BLAS and sparse neural nets.
redwood 5y ago
Great list. One omission I'm certainly tracking is Fauna
- ashvardanian 5y ago
  Thanks! It was on the longer list of smaller DBMS brands, but I was afraid to make the volume incomprehensible. Maybe we will write a more focused version, covering just smaller startups in 2022.
  - redwood 5y ago
    Sure Fauna are interesting with their serverless traction. Arango is another one, seems to target Germany maybe kind of like SUSE
    - ashvardanian 5y ago
      There is also ScyllaDB, Rockset, Hazelcast, Aerospike, VoltDB, GridGain… too many to count and all valued in hundreds of millions of $
      - redwood 5y ago
        Oh right Scylla! I have to say, it's remarkable that there are two independent companies dividing the already small C* space (they and Datastax)
dang 5y ago
Recent and related: Databases in 2021: A Year in Review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29731885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29731885 - Dec 2021 (126 comments)
- ashvardanian 5y ago
  Yes it is! It’s the first link in this article as well)
mamcx 5y ago
My dream is enter in this space with a version of Access+Excel in the spirit of the old foxpro/dbase tools. I have a sketch of the lang side here: https://tablam.org https://tablam.org A big problem is that get funding outside of USA is not that easy, and here in Colombia this kind of projects is not considered "profitable" by investors. But still convinced exist a lot of untapped potential in this area!
Andys 5y ago
I'm happy with cockroachdb lately. It is drop in replacement for postgres for most apps. It is quite a joy to use now. They have a new PAYG serveless offering that starts at $0 and scales up.

86 points by ashvardanian 5y ago

It has been really an amazing year for startup DB providers in terms of the raised capital but we are yet to see the yield as users…

m_ke 5y ago

It has been a gold rush for all startups, especially late stage. (see: https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/11/articles/body/20211127_fnc308.png https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/11...) I wouldn't use valuations as a signal of traction.

cletus 5y ago

Two thoughts spring to mind. The first is RethinkDB [1], which was a darling for awhile but couldn't seem to find a business model. I really wonder if it came later how much money it could've raised. There were claims made that the cloud killed RethinkDB. This past year seems to fly in the face of that theory. The second is: is this just database "success" (as measured by funding rounds and valuations) or is this just the general case with all startups? I honestly don't know. Still, I wasn't aware of all these players and it was a good post so thanks for that. [1]: https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/ https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/

ashvardanian 5y ago
Thanks a lot! I have never worked with RethinkDB specifically, but I can assure you - it's only one of many names in the DBMS graveyard. Most have probably died because of inability to monetize open-source software. For DBMS startups, which don't offer an order of magnitude improvements, the problem is convincing any one to replace a fundamental piece of infrastructure. For disruptive startups the problem is even bigger. As soon as you go open-source, all of your competitive technological advantage is gone.

geophile 5y ago

Having been in or associated with many database startups, I would not invest in one. You need to evangelize a product on which the life of someone’s project or company depends. in such a situation, you want boring technology that just works. Hard to imagine a new feature, or performance win, that justifies the vastly increased risk of obtaining it.

mnahkies 5y ago
I'm not sure I agree with this - there have been many postgres features over the past ~10 years that got me excited, some of the highlights that immediately spring to mind: - JSON / jsonb - improved partitioning support - identity columns I agree that I wouldn't want to trust a new entrant to the space unless it was subject to rigorous testing, eg https://jepsen.io/ https://jepsen.io/
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > postgres Postgres has the advantage that it's still open-source, can be ran locally and self-hosted (and has a healthy ecosystem of managed providers) and won't go away anytime soon. None of these are true for all these new DB startups.
- geophile 5y ago
  Doing well on the Jepsen tests is a very good sign. But it isn't anywhere near enough. Other things to consider: - The product has bugs not addressed by Jepsen. - Performance is inadequate. - The optimizer is immature, and you find yourself struggling to understand and work around its limitations. - Replication is missing or doesn't work well enough. - There is absolutely no substitute for N years of real-world experience, no matter how rigorous the company's testing. - Impossibility of finding people already familiar with the product, because they are all employed by the vendor. - Even aside from product issues, is the company profitable? If not, how long is it going to be in existence?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago

JCM9 5y ago

The VC market is super frothy at the moment. That drives up valuations in the short term and results in a very easy time to raise capital (aka Gold Rush). However what follows is a period where the market will turn the screws really hard on companies to show they have a viable and economically justifiable business or they’ll get washed out real quick. We’re not in a bubble like dot com but it will get very uncomfortable for companies that don’t have a clear path to self-sustaining economics.

ashvardanian 5y ago
Maybe not exactly the same bubble, but it's hard not to make parallels. Pets.com, one of the most comical cases of 2000s, was worth $400M at peak. When Chewy.com went public, they dwarfed that number with a new record of $13B. The analogy was so obvious, that CNBC wrote an article on that [1]. After that $CHWY managed to go as high as $118/share, translating into a market cap of roughly $50 Billion in December 2021. Now they are trading at about half that price. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/opinion-chewy-is-no-petscom.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/26/opinion-chewy-is-no-petscom....
- joshgel 5y ago
  Isn’t the fact that they got cut in half (and other examples, peloton for example) evidence that this isn’t a bubble. There are companies that are exploding in value, yes, but also companies just getting crushed left and right. If you’re growing, your value is very high, but miss your targets and boom, bye bye froth.
  - Traster 5y ago
    Isn't what you're describing stage 4 of a bubble - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/10/5-steps-of-a-bubble.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/10/5-steps-of-a...

zitterbewegung 5y ago

I think that open source database startups (or even ones that do data management like Elasticsearch) a big problem (other than finding traction obviously ). One is if you release your source code it’s very easy for someone else to just copy the straight forward business model of selling it as SaaS. The second one would be keeping your promises or even competing entrenched databases. Even when you have gotten this far a way that you can exit is to get one enterprise customer convinced to use it so badly they must acquirer you. The biggest lie I have seen across databases is actual time travel for your data. Or in other words given a date and time in the past it gives you what the data was then.

lumost 5y ago
> The biggest lie I have seen across databases is actual time travel for your data. Or in other words given a date and time in the past it gives you what the data was then. I worked at a company where we built this for our internal HBase clusters. Given any timestamp (or even better a commit ID) we could restore the cluster to that point in time. This was done through a combination of backing up the store files + write ahead logs. As I recall we had a retention limit for how much time we could do this for - but they were high enough for all of the "oh crap" moments.
- pengaru 5y ago
  That seems like it would burn a lot of space on store file snapshots to replay the relevant WAL atop. Did they integrate with an underlying filesystem's snapshotting feature to make the store file snapshots differentials, or was that also implemented in the database? Or just threw space at the problem?
bushbaba 5y ago
While not a database. Apache iceberg has the time travel functionality for read heavy big data analytics, among other optimizations.
Traster 5y ago
On the business model side of things, I think the most important thing to think about is the threat of the cloud providers. In the same way that MSFT were able to take most of the profits from the 90s/00s PC business, and Apple were able to take most of the profits from the appstore, and Amazon takes most of the profits from the Amazon market place, in the same way the cloud providers are realistically going to take the vast majority of the profits from running your DB in the cloud. Elasticsearch has exactly this problem. If they're lucky, Amazon will buy them. If they're unlucky Amazon will just steal their tech and take the profits (some would argue this already happened). They're by and large living in someone elses ecosystem.

therealdrag0 5y ago

Anyone know about RavenDB? Came across them years ago. Seems neat, but never heard of anyone using them. Also has been a for profit company for a while but not sure if they use venture or self sustaining

redwood 5y ago
Seemed like they had some traction in MSFT shops 5-6 years ago, guessing they hit some synergies in the .NET ecosystem?
- jeremycarter 5y ago
  Yeah a lot of .NET shops backed raven due to it's integration with LINQ at the time. It was actually very powerful and feature rich. Haven't touched raven in 8 years, although I have checked out their time series functionality.

titanomachy 5y ago

This is the first I’m hearing of Unum. Their benchmarks are impressive. I’ve often wondered how much we are held back in performance by all the layers of abstraction on data storage (db, os, filesystem, disk layout) and it seems they’re able to significantly beat the incumbents, partly by collapsing down the layers. I’m not sure what BLAS has to do with a key-value store.

ashvardanian 5y ago
> it seems they’re able to significantly beat the incumbents, partly by collapsing down the layers. Hahaha, thanks for the kind words! Not sure if I could describe our methodology better)) We originally come from and hope to continue working on AGI technologies (Artificial General Intelligence). Writing a key-value store and, subsequently, a DBMS came out of necessity, as other solutions seemed too bulky, slow, outdated and expensive. So we invested time into building UnumDB for internal use, but after first benchmarks, it was clear, that this must be available to broader audience. We will polish it in the next couple of months and make it deployable in public clouds, just like other DBMS brands. Now DBMS is our central focus, but with essential R&D out of the way, we will rebalance our priorities and continue working on BLAS and sparse neural nets.

redwood 5y ago

Great list. One omission I'm certainly tracking is Fauna

ashvardanian 5y ago
Thanks! It was on the longer list of smaller DBMS brands, but I was afraid to make the volume incomprehensible. Maybe we will write a more focused version, covering just smaller startups in 2022.
- redwood 5y ago
  Sure Fauna are interesting with their serverless traction. Arango is another one, seems to target Germany maybe kind of like SUSE
  - ashvardanian 5y ago
    There is also ScyllaDB, Rockset, Hazelcast, Aerospike, VoltDB, GridGain… too many to count and all valued in hundreds of millions of $
    - redwood 5y ago
      Oh right Scylla! I have to say, it's remarkable that there are two independent companies dividing the already small C* space (they and Datastax)

dang 5y ago

Recent and related: Databases in 2021: A Year in Review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29731885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29731885 - Dec 2021 (126 comments)

ashvardanian 5y ago
Yes it is! It’s the first link in this article as well)

mamcx 5y ago

My dream is enter in this space with a version of Access+Excel in the spirit of the old foxpro/dbase tools. I have a sketch of the lang side here: https://tablam.org https://tablam.org A big problem is that get funding outside of USA is not that easy, and here in Colombia this kind of projects is not considered "profitable" by investors. But still convinced exist a lot of untapped potential in this area!

Andys 5y ago

I'm happy with cockroachdb lately. It is drop in replacement for postgres for most apps. It is quite a joy to use now. They have a new PAYG serveless offering that starts at $0 and scales up.