MotherDuck – a builder of a serverless, easy-to-use data analytics platform based on the open-source database DuckDB – recently announced a $52.5 million round of funding. The funding round, which was led by Felicis, puts MotherDuck at a $400 million post-money valuation and brings their total funding to date to $100 million. The new and existing investors like a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more participated in the round as well. Felicis General Partner Viviana Faga will join MotherDuck’s Board of Directors in connection with the funding round.
MotherDuck’s notebook-like SQL environment enables you to query local and remote data using MotherDuck’s Hybrid execution engine. And the Modern Duck Stack is a suite of integrations which provide everything you need alongside MotherDuck for your data engineering pipelines like orchestration, ingestion, transformation, business intelligence, data science and AI capabilities.
Along with this announcement, MotherDuck will no longer have a waitlist for those interested in trying the platform. And anyone who wants to start leveraging the power of DuckDB at scale immediately can sign up at motherduck.com. Plus, the company also announced feedback-driven improvements to the analyst experience including faster data import, a better notebook interface with SQL auto-complete, optimized hybrid query planning, and improved database sharing.
As the popularity of DuckDB surges across the data community – due to its ability to run everywhere (including the browser), query data from anywhere without preloading it, and its super-fast execution of analytical queries – early adoption of MotherDuck validated the belief that data technology needs to focus on analyst experience. And as the DuckDB team continues to rapidly evolve the open source database engine and its close ties to cutting-edge academic research, MotherDuck has been able to add collaboration and scalability of the cloud for organizations who want to use DuckDB at a larger scale.
This partnership between the two teams led to over 2,000 users already finding success with MotherDuck across a multitude of use cases to include:
1.) A cloud data warehouse for the rest of us – MotherDuck provides a simplified, performant and efficient data warehouse based on the lightweight DuckDB engine for the majority of data warehouses that don’t need petabyte scale.
2.) A data lake query engine: MotherDuck uses DuckDB to query your data where it sits as parquet, iceberg, or CSV files.
3.) A serverless backend for data apps: Customers of SaaS applications like SaaSWorks and Dexibit need fast and fresh analytics on their data to make better decisions. And developers often tackle this with analytics queries running on the transactional database, which are not designed for the task. MotherDuck uses DuckDB to provide a better solution.
MotherDuck’s ecosystem also continues to grow. Following an initial product launch in June, the company announced 16 integrations with the platform. And MotherDuck recently announcing 11 more: Cube, dltHub, Evidence, GoodData, Kestra, Metabase, InfinyOn, LlamaIndex, Sling, Streamlit, and Voltron Data. Airbyte will be available to users today, while integrations with Fivetran and Tableau are both underway.
MotherDuck’s funding announcement and product updates come as DuckDB is preparing for its latest release 0.9.0 – which will also be available to MotherDuck users.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re proud of what we’ve been able to achieve over the last year alongside the DuckDB community and the DuckDB Labs team. Our initial funding allowed us to grow our engineering team to get our platform launched and in use by almost 2,000 analysts. With this funding and the momentum surrounding our platform and DuckDB’s adoption, the sky’s the limit. The key is a simplified scale-up approach to SQL analytics; for the 95% of us who do not have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on an engine like DuckDB can be faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architectures. Spending the last week in Amsterdam with the DuckDB team has solidified that DuckDB is the future. We’re excited about bringing the power of its simplicity to organizations at scale and improving the analyst experience across the board.”
— Jordan Tigani, CEO and Co-Founder of MotherDuck
“We looked at various OLAP platforms that could serve our broad and demanding data platform that serves the modern CFO as we were hitting scale limits (price and performance) with Postgres on RDS. MotherDuck with DuckDB was by far the fastest – both in the cloud and run on our developer’s machines – bridging price and performance and greatly increasing productivity. We feel we have partnered with the future of Cloud and desktop-based OLAP providers with MotherDuck.”
— Jim O’Neill, CTO & Co-Founder, SaaSWorks
“We are excited to partner with Jordan and the MotherDuck team as they build a platform designed to seamlessly blend speed and user-friendliness, thereby simplifying and making analytics widely accessible. Analysts clearly need the speed of working with data at the edge, as well as the flexibility to query cloud-based data. The era of serverless data analytics is here.”
— Viviana Faga, General Partner, Felicis
