Interview: B&F caught up Rohit de Souza, CEO of MariaDB, following his visit to Finland where he met founder Michael “Monty” Widenius.
MariaDB was founded in 2009 by some of the original MySQL developers, spurred into action by Oracle buying MySQL owner Sun Microsystems. They developed their SkySQL open source databases as a MySQL fork. It was an alternative to proprietary RDBMSes and became one of the most popular database servers in the world. It went through some ten funding events, amassing around $230 million before going public through a SPAC transaction in 2023. In February 2022, it was valued at $672 million but started trading at the much lower $368 million. Michael Howard was CEO at the time, but Paul O’Brien took the post in March 2023. Tom Siegel was appointed CRO and Jonah Harris CTO.
Things did not go well. MariaDB posted poor quarterly results, received NYSE warnings about its low market capitalization, laid off 28 percent of its staff, closed down its Xpand and SkySQL offerings, and announced Azure Database for MariaDB would shut down in September 2025. A lender threatened to claw back cash from its bank account. Harris left in April 2024. O’Brien left in May that year.
MariaDB was acquired by private equity house K1 Investment Management in September 2024, at a suggested $37 million price, about a tenth of its initial public trading capitalization.
At that time, MariaDB had 700 customers, including major clients such as Deutsche Bank, Nokia, RedHat, Samsung, ServiceNow, the US Department of Defense, and multiple US intelligence and federal civilian agencies. This gave K1 something to build on. It appointed Rohit de Souza as CEO, with previous executive experience from his roles at Actian and MicroFocus. O’Brien was transitioned out to advisor status.
De Souza’s job is to pick up the pieces and rebuild the company after its near-disastrous public ownership experience. How has he set about doing that?
He claimed MariaDB had been “completely mismanaged,” but there is a strong community and it’s “still the number three open source database in the world.” It has had a billion downloads of its open source software and it’s used by up to 1.3 million enterprises. “And if that’s not a customer base who wants to continue using its product, and see it develop further,” then he doesn’t know what is, De Souza said.
Some executive musical chairs took place. Siegel left the CRO job in January this year, Widenius was rehired as the CTO, and Mike Mooney became MariaDB’s CRO.
There is a free community edition of MariaDB and a paid-for Enterprise edition that has support. De Souza said there is “a very small sliver of those who are paying for it, but that’s because we’ve not managed that whole process right.” MariaDB has been leaving money on the table.
He said: “For instance, take a big bank, a prominent bank in the UK, they’re using both the community version and the enterprise one. They’re paying us support on the enterprise piece, but there’s been no diligence with them around saying, ‘Hey, if you’re going to get support from us, you need to get support on the entire estate.'”
“People can pay for the support on the enterprise and then use the skills they’ve got to fix the community edition. They use the support on the community stuff.”
This will be one strategy De Souza will use to increase revenue from the customer base. He said “there’s scope for the smooth scheme increase in the discussions” with customers.
How have customers responded to that idea? “So far I’ve touched a lot of customers as we’ve gone forward. The reception has been fabulous. The reception has been, ‘Oh really? We didn’t know you were going down that path. We thought MariaDB was sort of on its way out’.”
He is also updating the product. “We talked to them about what we’re doing around vector, how it’s an obvious development. It’s out with the community edition already and the GA piece for the enterprise edition will be in there soon.”
MariaDB added vector support alongside its existing transactional, analytical, and semi-structured data support in January.
De Souza has been giving MariaDB employees and partners “the message that there’s more value we can provide to our customer base. There’s more revenue that we can get from our customer base for this.”
He told us he had visited Widenius in Finland, and met his daughter Maria, after whom MariaDB is named, and other family members.
He said of Monty: “This guy, this is his life’s work. This is part of why I joined, because I see so much value in this and I see so much innate capability. Until this point engineering at MariaDB was every engineer did what he thought was right. There was no hope. Monty is a fabulous technologist, but you can’t ask him to drive the roadmap. He doesn’t want to do that.”
So, De Souza said: “You need a chief product officer. I’ve got a good chief product officer. I’ve got a good chief technology officer. I brought in a top-notch engineering leader to make sure that the trains run on time, and make sure our releases are right, make sure our roadmaps are correct. I brought in the right AI talent to make sure that we’re working on AI to put next to SQL in the database to do checkpointing.”
“I want to make it really, really simple to use for all of the fellas trying to mine the gold out of the AI system.”
The situation is that a MariaDB customer is looking to use AI agents and have them access structured and unstructured information in the database. That information will need vectorizing and the vectors stored in the database. Is MariaDB developing its own AI agents?
“We’re using traditional LLMs, Langchain or whatever. Whatever you want to use. We’d like to be able to use the typical externally available agents.”
Think of the LLM as an arrow and MariaDB as a data target.”“Use whatever arrows you want and we’ll make our target big and bold for those arrows and we’ll make it usable. We’ll make whatever information you’ve got stored in MariaDB accessible to all your AI, to the rest of your AI estate.”
MariaDB may well add an AI pipeline capability, including data masking to screen out sensitive data, “filtered to remove sensitive information. Then maybe transformed a little and then fed upstream and add to that on the front end the right security models. This is thanks to K1 and their relationships in the security area.”
De Souza is also concerned that his customers don’t get information leakage through AI agent use. “So for example, if you did a query through your large language model of your financial database to, say, give me what’s the revenue of the company, and think, ‘Hey, I’ll email this to my friend downstairs.’ You won’t be able to. You won’t have access to that on the front end.”
He sees AI agents as “extraordinarily powerful microscopes,” and will be looking at partnerships and/or acquisitions to gain technology access.
He said the company is getting enthused and growing. “I’m adding 20 percent to the staff in the company and I’m having no trouble finding the right talent. Because you say to prospective talent, check out MariaDB’s customer base and exposure and heritage. Check out what we can do with it. Do you want to be part of this or would you prefer to go risk yourself elsewhere?”
De Souza is adding senior advisors to MariaDB, such as Linux Foundation exec director Jim Zemlin and ServiceNow president Amit Zavery. He said ServiceNow has been trying to develop its own database. “We’ve just renewed a relationship with them and I’m convinced that at some point [CEO Jim] McDermott is going to see the light” – and use MariaDB.
He said there is a substantial large enterprise appeal in moving off Oracle and saving lots of cash. “We now have lots of interest. We’re in the process of migrating a large Middle Eastern airline off Oracle. They’ve said, ‘Show me that you can move a critical system,’ which is a little unnerving for us, and I’ve had to have all hands on that. But if that’s successful, we’ll have proved – we’ve already proved it in financial services, in retail – we’ll be able to prove it in the airlines and the transportation business.”
Another direction for development is automating the migration off Oracle. De Souza said: “The Oracle mode will only be available for the enterprise, of course, because these are going to be customers who are already paying millions of dollars.”
