MotherDuck, builder of a serverless, easy to use data analytics platform based on open source database DuckDB, announced a $47.5 million round of funding. The $35m Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz follows a $12.5m seed round led by Redpoint. These investments put the company at a $175M valuation. The funding will be used to build out the company’s growing engineering and GTM teams and further the team’s close collaboration with DuckDB Labs. Other investors include Madrona, Amplify Partners, and Altimeter.
The founding team, led by Google BigQuery founding engineer Jordan Tigani, brings together former leaders at some of the most innovative companies in data, including Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Meta, Elastic, Firebolt, SingleStore, and more. Through their experience with real-world users, the co-founders knew that the vast majority of workloads are not “big data,” a term that has diminished in usefulness thanks to recent advances in hardware. Combining that knowledge with the accelerating adoption of DuckDB, the team realized they could bring together the elegance and speed of an in-process database with the collaboration and scalability of the cloud. DuckDB, an in-process database analogous to SQLite for analytics workloads, has achieved widespread adoption in the data community based on its ability to run everywhere (including in the browser), query data from anywhere without preloading it, and its super-fast execution of analytical queries based on the latest academic research. Bringing this technology to more people will enable an entirely new universe of use cases previously thought impossible at an unprecedented level of efficiency and performance.
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“The fact is, ‘Big Data’ is dead; the simplicity and the ease of making sense of your data is a lot more important than its size,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO and Co-Founder of MotherDuck. “Laptops today are faster than a data warehouse. With advances in hardware, distributed computation is no longer necessary for most workloads. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users, but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience. We are taking the power of DuckDB and combining it with serverless analytics to help scale up and scale down with ease.”
With this funding, MotherDuck is able to build out their world-class engineering team and add a go-to-market function to provide a cloud analytics platform for organizations that want to use DuckDB in an evolved way. At the same time, it allows DuckDB to continue to be a vehicle for academic research. “DuckDB has been fortunate to have hundreds of contributors around the world. We look forward to the continued growth and adoption that partnering with MotherDuck will bring,” said Dr. Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB. “Thanks to the MotherDuck team, we are able to focus our efforts on independent innovation of the DuckDB core platform and growth of the open source community.”
The momentum behind the DuckDB open source community cannot be ignored: every month DuckDB’s DB Engines score is growing at 40%, DuckDB’s Python distribution is downloaded 400k times, and Duckdb.org brings 100k unique visitors. “We see tremendous potential in MotherDuck – not just in the market they represent, but in the caliber of talent that is building this game-changing platform,” said Tomasz Tunguz at Redpoint Ventures. “We’re excited to partner with the team and bring the power of DuckDB to more people than ever before.”
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