CockroachDB creator Cockroach Labs raises $160 million at a $2 billion valuation

Cockroach Labs, the software company best known for the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database CockroachDB, has raised $ 160 million in a series E round of funding led by Altimeter Capital. This takes the New York-based company’s valuation to $ 2 billion, more than double its valuation at its series D round last May.

Founded by ex-Googlers in 2015, CockroachDB has been described as nearly impossible to take down, hence its name — cockroaches are somewhat renowned for their resilience. With CockroachDB, companies can store multiple copies of their data in different locations to ensure uninterrupted access, so if there is an outage in one location CockroachDB reroutes traffic to a version of the data stored elsewhere. The company counts Equifax and Comcast among its customer base.

Given that CockroachDB is available under an open source agreement, it’s free for any company to use and embed in their own applications. However, to offer CockroachDB “as a service” a license is required, which is one of the ways Cockroach Labs makes money. As with just about all things “cloud” over the past year, Cockroach Labs said it has seen significant growth with its revenues and customer count more than doubling throughout 2020.

Cockroach Labs has now raised $ 355 million since its inception. Its latest cash injection saw a slew of return investors, including Alphabet’s GV, Benchmark, Bond, FirstMark, Index Ventures, and Tiger Global, alongside new backers Greenoaks and Lone Pine.