Citus Data Secures $9.5 Million in Series A Funding, for Scaling Out PostgreSQL, the “World’s Most Advanced Open Source Database”

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 20, 2015) - Citus Data, creator of solutions that scale out PostgreSQL for real-time big data, today announced it has secured $9.5 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation by previous Citus Data investors including Data Collective and Vaizra Investments. Ari Zilka, a partner at Khosla Ventures and previously chief technology officer at Hortonworks, will join the Citus Data board of directors. The funding round will be used to grow the Citus Data development team and expand sales and marketing efforts.

Citus Data powers the relational database, the mainstay of database infrastructure, to scale across hundreds of billions of events for real-time workloads. Instead of building the distributed database from scratch, the CitusDB database leverages the maturity and performance of the popular PostgreSQL database, recognized as the world's most advanced open source database. CitusDB can:

• Enable companies who are already familiar with relational databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle to scale to billions of data points, without starting or hiring from scratch
• Simplify complex big data architectures that require combining non-relational technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL, and relational databases
• Bridge the gap between operational and analytics databases for real-time big data use cases such as customer-facing analytics dashboards and online reporting

Having an elastically scalable, real-time relational database that runs on commodity machines is a powerful addition to any modern data infrastructure, whether in the public, private or hybrid cloud. Unlike earlier approaches that create a fork of the underlying database for offline analytics, CitusDB tackles both real-time mixed analytic and short-request workloads simultaneously. It is also unique as a distributed database that always stays current with the latest version of the underlying project, allowing its users to leverage the extensible and open PostgreSQL ecosystem. CitusDB is easy to use; in particular, it requires few changes to the application layer, no middleware for users to manage, and offers day one productivity for existing database administrators and developers.

Quotes

Umur Cubukcu, CEO and Co-founder of Citus Data
“This funding round reflects the significant market opportunity for Citus Data,” said Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder of Citus Data. “Customers want a simple way to build real-time big data applications, without sacrificing relational power -- and we enable them to do that without breaking the bank. With the ever increasing growth rate of data and strong PostgreSQL adoption, we are in a great position to provide unique solutions for managing and analyzing big data. CitusDB will become a preferred alternative over current technologies in many use cases.”

Ari Zilka, Partner at Khosla Ventures
“Scaling data infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges companies face. Citus Data’s off-the-shelf database solution for extending the analytic capabilities of PostgreSQL will transform how companies grow,” said Ari Zilka, partner at Khosla Ventures. “Already, Citus has given control back to developers and enterprises with minimal upfront time and investment.”

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Additional Information

• Citus Data announced the first annual PGConf Silicon Valley PostgreSQL conference, which is November 17-18, 2015 at the South San Francisco Conference Center. Organized in cooperation with the San Francisco PostgreSQL Users Group, PGConf Silicon Valley is the first exclusively PostgreSQL-focused technical conference held in Silicon Valley.
• During 2015, Citus Data has grown to nearly 20 employees in the United States and Europe, including new vice presidents of marketing and sales.
• Earlier in 2015, Citus Data has released CitusDB 4.1, a real-time operational and analytics database which massively scales out PostgreSQL and speeds up analytics queries. CitusDB 4.1 is compatible with the latest version of PostgreSQL, v9.4.
• Khosla Ventures was founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. With over four billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas and has invested in companies such as Climate Corporation, Arista Networks, Okta, RingCentral, Square and AppNexus.