PeerDB has raised US$3.6 million in seed round funding. The funding round was led by 8VC and Y Combinator. Other investors include Wayfinder Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Flex Capital, Rogue Capital, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective and several angel investors.
The company will split the funds across four areas. These are building its engineering team, propelling its go-to-market and client acquisition initiatives, and supporting its growth. Importantly, the company also saw revenue double every two months.
PeerDB CEO and co-founder Sai Krishna Srirampur, said, “Postgres is becoming the database of the world and the de facto primary database for both enterprises and SMBs. Existing data movement and ETL tools are not built for Postgres – they often fail at scale due to painfully slow syncs, lack of reliability and lack of native features.
“Time has come for someone to give enough care to the world’s most adopted open source database. Thanks to all our investors and customers for believing in us and sharing our vision.”
Who is PeerDB?
PeerDB is focused on helping Postgres users move very large volumes of data at ultra-high speed. With its singular focus on Postgres, the company claims it can move data from Postgres up to “10 times faster data movement and at one-fifth the cost.”
On the company’s website, it has published comparisons between it and its two largest competitors, AirByte and FiveTran.
Two of the use cases for PeerDB are AI and the explosion in data analytics at hyperscale. Both require very large amounts of data to be moved and aggregated. With demand for both just ramping up. PeerDB sees a significant opportunity. So, it seems, do the seed round investors.
What will also appeal to those investors is that there is no free version of PeerDB. It is operating on the basis that if something is worth having, it is important to pay for it. Its entry-level version, called Hobby, comes in at $250 per month. At the other end of the scale is its Large version, which costs $4,000 per month. In between are two other versions. Choosing which version you need depends on the number of millions of rows you expect to move each month.
PeerDB has listed five key use cases in its announcement of the seed funding. They are:
- Fast and cost-effective replication to Data Warehouses
- Real-time streaming and Change Data Capture
- Database migrations
- Enterprise-grade Postgres High Availability (HA) and Backups
- Vector ETL
Why focus on Postgres?
Postgres has over 35 years of continuous development. In that time, it has grown to become the fourth-ranked database engine. While Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have seen their market share decline slightly over the last decade, Postgres has closed the gap to them and moved away from the rest of the database market.
It would be easy to ascribe much of that growth to its open-source credentials and popularity among developers. But that masks its increasing appeal to enterprise customers. All three primary cloud providers have launched their own versions, Amazon with Aurora. Google with AlloyDB and Microsoft with Cosmos DB.
Importantly, the PostgreSQL Development Group released updates for all supported versions in February. In doing so, it sent a clear message to the database market that despite the moves by the cloud vendors, it will continue to support and develop the underlying product.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
By focusing solely on Postgres, PeerDB is betting on Its continued growth. It’s a fairly safe bet. Postgres’s growth over the last decade, Microsoft, Google, and AWS launching their own versions, and increased enterprise uptake show strong demand.
PeerDB has also picked its use cases carefully. All of them are focused on high-volume data copying and movement. That is where it has focused its research and development so far. The question is, will it continue to keep a narrow focus, or will it now start to look at a wider set of use cases? If it widens its target market, will it be able to maintain its revenue growth rate?
It is surprising that, given its claims to double revenue every two months, it had to seek funding. This suggests that its burn rate is much higher than its growth rate. Will the plan to invest more in go-to-market and customer acquisition help it balance the books? If it does, then the company founders will find themselves in a good position with just seed money to earn out. If it doesn’t, how long will it be before the company goes back and seeks more funding?
By calling out AI and analytics, the company is certainly backing two of the biggest growth areas for data. It will be interesting to see how much of that market it can take.
