Database startup MotherDuck has announced that it has successfully raised $52.5 million in a Series B funding round. The investment was led by venture capital firm Felicis, with participation from well-known investors such as a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, and Zero Prime. This latest funding round brings MotherDuck’s total raised capital to an impressive $100 million.
Key Takeaway
MotherDuck has secured $52.5 million in funding in a Series B round led by Felicis. The investment will be used to expand the company’s engineering and go-to-market teams. MotherDuck differentiates itself through its focus on performance, cost-efficiency, and flexibility, offering a scale-up approach to analytics based on its DuckDB platform.
Expanding MotherDuck’s Engineering and Go-to-Market Teams
The new funds will be utilized to expand MotherDuck’s engineering and go-to-market teams, as CEO Jordan Tigani explains. The company, which currently has 32 employees, plans to increase its headcount to 45 by the end of the year. Tigani highlights the company’s dedication to continuous improvement, stating, “Since we launched in mid-June, we’ve taken feedback from hundreds of users and quickly iterated to improve performance.”
The Origins of MotherDuck
MotherDuck was inspired by the observation that the majority of companies’ database workloads fall within the range of 1GB to 10GB. While existing database vendors were primarily focused on handling massive data sets, recent advancements in hardware have made it more efficient to work with smaller data sets. The company’s CEO, Jordan Tigani, a former engineering director at database startup SingleStore and a founding engineer at Google’s BigQuery, saw an opportunity to fill this gap in the market.
Tigani reached out to Hannes Mühleisen, one of the co-creators of the lightweight database platform DuckDB, to explore the possibility of productizing DuckDB. Recognizing the potential synergies, Tigani and Mühleisen joined forces to create MotherDuck. The company aims to combine the speed and elegance of DuckDB with the collaboration and scalability of the cloud.
Why Choose MotherDuck?
MotherDuck differentiates itself from other companies offering similar cloud-based open source database solutions through its focus on performance, cost-efficiency, and flexibility. DuckDB, the underlying database engine, enables MotherDuck to run and query data from various sources, including web browsers, and provides faster analytical query execution compared to alternatives like PostgreSQL.
According to Tigani, using transactional databases like Postgres for analytics often results in reduced performance and higher costs compared to using analytical databases. He believes that for the majority of organizations that don’t have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on the DuckDB engine can be faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly than distributed architectures.
Future Developments for MotherDuck
MotherDuck already boasts nearly 2,000 users, including companies such as ATM.com. The company has removed the waitlist for its platform and has several improvements and features planned for the near future. This includes enhancing the programming notebook experience with auto-complete, faster data import capabilities, improved database sharing, and integrating the upcoming release of DuckDB, DuckDB 0.9.0, into the MotherDuck platform.
