Cockroach Labs
By Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs is a software company founded in 2015 by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. The company specializes in developing CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed for cloud applications. CockroachDB is engineered to provide high availability, scalability, and resilience, making it an ideal solution for modern, data-intensive applications. The company is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in Austin, Bangalore, London, and Toronto.
The founders of Cockroach Labs, Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell, met at UC Berkeley and later worked together at Google. They were inspired to create CockroachDB based on their experiences with Google's Spanner and the limitations they observed in existing database systems. The company has experienced significant growth, tripling its annual recurring revenue in 2021 and expanding its customer base to over 200 enterprises, including notable names like Netflix, Bose, and Shipt.
Cockroach Labs has raised a total of approximately $633 million in funding over several rounds. The most recent round, a Series F, raised $278 million at a valuation of $5 billion in December 2021. This funding has been instrumental in accelerating the company's growth and expanding its market presence globally. Investors include prominent venture capital firms such as Greenoaks, Benchmark, Index Ventures, and Sequoia.
CockroachDB is the flagship product of Cockroach Labs, offering a cloud-native, distributed SQL database that combines the horizontal scalability of NoSQL databases with the transactional integrity of traditional SQL databases. Key features of CockroachDB include:
Recent updates to CockroachDB include enhanced support for multi-region deployments, increased security controls, and improved observability with Prometheus-compatible metrics. The database also now supports PL/pgSQL and user-defined functions, making it easier to migrate from traditional RDBMS to CockroachDB. These features aim to streamline application development and improve resilience and recovery times.
Cockroach Labs prides itself on a mission-driven culture focused on innovation, resilience, and customer success. The company aims to build tools that make data management easier and more reliable for developers. With a strong emphasis on open-source principles, Cockroach Labs fosters a collaborative environment where contributions from the community are highly valued.
CockroachDB has a growing user base that includes major enterprises and innovative startups. The database is used by companies such as Comcast, Netflix, Bose, and Shipt for various applications, from user account management to logistics and payment systems. The open-source nature of CockroachDB has also attracted a vibrant community of developers, with over 22,000 GitHub stars and more than 500 contributors. The CockroachDB Serverless platform has further expanded the user base, drawing in over 10,000 new users shortly after its beta launch.
