Enterprise software creator Cockroach Labs makes its ambitiousness clear with its aim to “scale fast, survive anything, and thrive everywhere.” With the announcement Tuesday of its $160 million Series E round bringing its total funding raised to $355 million at a $2 billion valuation, the company is making progress toward that promise.
Cockroach designed a transactional database, CockroachDB, to help ensure daily online processes like checking your bank balance or ordering an Uber work with no interruptions.
“When you go to use an application, you expect it to just work, and you expect it to work instantly. You also expect it to work anywhere in the world where you want to use that service,” Cockroach CMO Peter Guagenti told Built In.
The world is continually becoming more digitized, especially since the pandemic, so the data systems that power these applications are experiencing new demands and requirements. This means the need for updated data support infrastructure has surfaced as well. As a result, Cockroach shifted its focus toward moving data storage to the cloud. Because of its omnipresence, its platform can also protect enterprises against data loss and app crashes.
“[We’re] a single database that lives all over the world,” Guagenti said. “We replicate the data across multiple locations, and if the location goes away, be it a server, or a zone or an entire data center, there’s no disruption in continuity of service.”
The recent funding round for the company was led by Altimeter Capital and follows a huge year of growth for Cockroach. In addition to raising its Series D back in May, it more than doubled its customer count and revenue and has also seen a fourfold increase in adoption of its CockroachDB software.
With the fresh capital, Cockroach aims to pursue more growth in the data marketspace. As the company continues to scale, it’s also planning to double its headcount of 200 this year while specifically “doubling down” on product engineering. It is hiring at its NYC headquarters across all departments.
“There’s not a lot of enterprise software companies that decide to start in New York City, so Cockroach is on the march to be one of the largest employers in this category,” Guagenti said. “We’re hungry for staff.”
