Database supplier SingleStore has raised $116 million from its third funding round in three years as it looks to continue an aggressive hiring rate and gets ready for, we think, an IPO.
The round was led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, along with new investor Sanabil Investments and contributions from existing investors Dell Technologies Capital, GV, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM Ventures, Insight Partners, and others.
SingleStore CEO Raj Verma said: “With this funding, we have raised $278 million over the last 20 months, and our valuation is upwards of $1.3 billion. We are truly at unicorn status.”
The plan is to “invest time and resources to innovate more and even faster” and keep up the pace of staff recruitment.
The SingleStoreDB unifies transactional and analytic workloads and can run either in memory or in a hybrid memory + storage drive (disks, SSDs) mode. The company claims its combined transaction and analytical features obviate time-consuming extract, transform and load (ETL) procedures, enabling faster analytical results. Verma claimed in a blog: “Results show that SingleStoreDB delivers a 50 percent lower TCO against the combination of MySQL and Snowflake and a 60 percent lower TCO compared to the combination of PostgreSQL and Redshift.”
“Our purpose is to unify and simplify modern data. We believe the future is real time, and the future demands a fast, unified and high-reliability database – all aspects in which we are strongly differentiated,” he added.
Investment money is pouring in to analytics database companies, either on-premises or in the cloud. So far this year we have seen NoSQL database DataStax raise $115 million, Dremio raise $160 million for its data lakehouse, data warehouse startup Firebolt raise $100 million, and analytics startup Imply raise $100 million. That’s a total of almost $600 million in six months.
Heavy hints
Where do we get our IPO ideas from? Heavy hints dropped by SingleStore.
Firstly, there is a new general counsel at SingleStore, Meaghan Nelson, who has had, the company says, “prior roles in private practice taking companies such as MaxPoint Interactive, Etsy, Natera and Veeva through their IPOs.“
Nelson said: “I feel that my deep experience working closely with companies through the IPO process along with my experience in scaling G&A (General and Administrative) orgs will be of great value to SingleStore as we continue to achieve new heights.”
Secondly, SingleStore has hired a new CFO, Brad Kinnish, and this appointment, along with that of Nelson, will “infuse a great depth of experience to the C-suite, making it even more equipped to explore future paths for company growth.”
The previous CFO, Manoj Jain, now a business advisor to SingleStore says he’s not leaving the company. Verma told us: “Manoj wanted to step back into an advisory role, allowing for a CFO with extensive IPO experience to be added to the team, and allowing him to take a less time-intensive role so he could increase time with family.”
Verma said about the new exec hires: “I cannot emphasize enough how strategic these new leaders are for SingleStore, and how excited I am to see what we can accomplish together.”
What about timing? Kinnish said: “It’s such an exciting time in the database industry. Major forces such as the rise in cloud and the blending of operational and transactional workloads are causing a third wave of disruption in the way data is managed. SingleStore by design is a leader in the market, and I am confident we will achieve a lot in the coming year.”
