PlanetScale Raises $22 Million Led by Andreessen Horowitz to Make it Easy for Enterprises to Scale Transactional Data Across Multiple Clouds

PlanetScale, the first company to allow businesses to operationalize Vitess, today announced $22 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from SignalFire and others. This latest investment will fuel PlanetScale’s growth, allowing the company to expand its team and continue to develop products for enterprises to scale, organize, access and get value from their burgeoning data.

Co-founders Jitendra Vaidya (CEO) and Sugu Sougoumarane (CTO) are infrastructure veterans who scaled YouTube and Dropbox and invented Vitess, the open source system for scaling large MySQL databases that originally powered YouTube during its hyper-growth to billions of users. PlanetScale is based on the battle-hardened Vitess which now serves billions of queries in production at YouTube, Slack, Square, Pinterest, Hubspot, and others. With PlanetScale, enterprises can for the first time ever operationalize Vitess to scale their databases and handle the most demanding applications. 

“I’ve been waiting for a platform like PlanetScale for the last decade,” said Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and board member of PlanetScale. “With its powerful offering, coupled with an all-star team, PlanetScale is uniquely positioned to upend the database market.”

As businesses look to address the challenge of scaling and interpreting data, there’s an ever-growing migration toward the ease and speed of Kubernetes, the open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. PlanetScale has built a platform that makes deploying Vitess in Kubernetes easy for enterprises. PlanetScale’s pioneering multi-cloud database-as-a-service, PlanetScale Cloud Database, built on the same platform, allows businesses to scale high-volume databases distributed over multiple regions and multiple cloud providers.

“We’ve heard from hundreds of developers asking us to do for them what we accomplished with YouTube,” explained co-founder and CEO Vaidya. “Many well-known companies who started out by deploying Vitess on their own are now PlanetScale customers and we look forward to powering others through their digital transformations.”

In a post-General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) world, PlanetScale makes data locality implementation easy. By allowing companies to re-shard databases on the fly, PlanetScale relocates user data to comply with regulations like GDPR as well as safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes.

The funding round comes shortly after the company came out of stealth in December 2018 and other investors include Matt Cutts, head of the US Digital Service, and the Cultural Leadership Fund from Andreessen Horowitz.

To see how PlanetScale can transform your business, go to planetscale.com

About PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a relational database platform aimed at helping companies horizontally scale data in the cloud. Founded by the creators of Vitess, MySQL industry’s most proven database sharding solution, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SignalFire, head of the US Digital Service Matt Cutts and Cultural Leadership Fund, PlanetScale allows businesses to operationalize Vitess to protect, access and derive insights from their data.
 
The company’s seed investors include: YouTube Founder Steve Chen; Dropbox’s ex-CTO Aditya Agarwal; Google’s ‘Browser Boss’ and Director of Engineering Parisa Tabriz; Affirm  Co-Founder & CEO Max Levchin; MuleSoft Founder & CTO Ross Mason; Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo; GitHub VP of Infrastructure Engineering Sam Lambert; Prasanna Srikhanta; Coda Co-Founder and CEO Shishir Mehrotra; Investor, Advisor and former SVP of Engineering at Yelp Mike Stoppelman; Start Smart Labs Founders Ellen Salisbury and Raymie Stata; South Park Commons Founder Ruchi Sanghvi; and Box Group. Chris Aniszczyk, COO and CTO at Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the VP at Linux Foundation also stands as an advisor to the company.

For more information, visit planetscale.com.

Contact Information

Kathryn Ryan

Senior Account Executive

VSC for PlanetScale

PlanetScale@vscconsulting.com