DBOS: Cloud-Native Operating System Company Raises $8.5 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Mar 12, 2024

Cloud-native operating system company DBOS announced that it has raised $8.5 million in seed funding and released its first product offering. Engine Ventures and Construct Capital led the funding round. And Sinewave and GutBrain Ventures also joined the round.

In connection with the funding round, Engine Ventures general partner Reed Sturtevant joins Andy Palmer, Michael Stonebraker, and Peter Kraft on the DBOS board. And the company also announced the release of DBOS Cloud, a transactional serverless application development platform (powered by DBOS) that makes cloud applications easier to develop, deploy, and secure.

Founded by Turing Award laureate and Postgres creator Mike Stonebraker, Databricks co-founder and CTO Matei Zaharia, and a joint team of MIT and Stanford computer scientists, DBOS aims to dramatically simplify the way cloud applications are built, deployed, and secured.

The team’s breakthrough was DBOS (database-oriented operating system), based on several years of joint MIT-Stanford research and development. This technology runs operating system services on top of a high-performance distributed database.

This result is a scalable, fault-tolerant, and cyber-resilient foundation for cloud-native applications that can store all state, logs, and other system data in SQL-accessible tables.

DBOS is initially available for developers to experience through DBOS Cloud. DBOS Cloud is used to build and run serverless functions, workflows, and applications. Since DBOS Cloud runs on DBOS, it provides a unique experience that reduces the challenges of development, deployment, and operations while also increasing cybersecurity and cyber-resilience.

DBOS Cloud is the only serverless computing platform to provide support for stateful functions and workflows; built-in fault tolerance with once-and-only once execution; time-travel debugging; SQL-accessible observability data; and enablement of cyberattack self-detection and self-recovery.

The company will use the funding to grow the engineering team and continue to enhance the fully managed DBOS Cloud transactional computing platform and its components: the open-source DBOS SDK, currently for TypeScript, the DBOS Time Travel Debugger, and the DBOS operating system.

KEY QUOTES:

“The cloud has outgrown 33 year-old Linux, and it’s time for a new approach. If you run the OS on a distributed database as DBOS does, fault-tolerance, multi-node scaling, state management, observability and security get much easier. You don’t need containers or orchestration layers, and you write less code because the OS is doing more for you.”

– Mike Stonebraker

“With DBOS, developers can build applications in days that now take months on conventional cloud platforms. Moreover, developers can seamlessly use the same tools they use today. So, there is very little learning curve to benefit from the rapid development, guaranteed transactions, and increased cybersecurity of DBOS.”

– Matei Zaharia, Chief Technologist and Co-Founder of Databricks, who is also a co-founder of DBOS

“The cybersecurity implications of DBOS are truly transformative. By simplifying the cloud application stack, DBOS greatly reduces the attack surface of cloud applications. On top of that, DBOS enables self-detection of cyberattacks within seconds without the use of expensive external analytics tools, and it can restore itself to a pre-attack state in minutes. It’s a DevSecOps game-changer.”

– DBOS co-founder and former Head of Cybersecurity Practice at BCG Platinion, Michael Coden

“Cloud applications have been running on decades-old operating systems, the equivalent of driving cars and trucks cross-country on dirt roads. DBOS provides a necessary and overdue overhaul. Engine Ventures feels privileged to invest in this world-class team with a product that can become the new foundation.”

– Reed Sturtevant, Engine Ventures general partner

“At Construct, we understand the large leaps that modern operations must make to remain competitive and hit productivity gains for the decades to come, and DBOS hits right at the core of this, providing a new foundation for application development. DBOS Cloud is simple and resilient by default creating the opportunity to create amazing new reliable applications. We are thrilled to be working with this deeply technical and accomplished team again at DBOS.”

– Dayna Grayson, Construct Capital co-founder & Managing Partner