- Launched out of stealth in December 2018, PlanetScale is one of the first businesses to operationalize Vitess — which makes it easier for enterprises to scale data in the cloud
- Recently, PlanetScale raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz
PlanetScale — a company that came out of stealth in December 2018 — is one of the first businesses to operationalize Vitess. And recently, PlanetScale announced it raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. SignalFire and several other companies participated in this round.
This round of funding will fuel PlanetScale’s growth and it allows the company to expand its team and continue to develop products for enterprises to scale, organize, access and receive value from their expanding data sets.
PlanetScale’s co-founders Jitendra Vaidya (CEO) and Sugu Sougoumarane (CTO) are known as infrastructure veterans who scaled YouTube and Dropbox. They are also known for inventing the Vitess open source system for scaling large MySQL databases that originally powered YouTube during its hyper-growth phase of adding billions of users.
“We’ve heard from hundreds of developers asking us to do for them what we accomplished with YouTube,” explained co-founder and CEO Vaidya. “Many well-known companies who started out by deploying Vitess on their own are now PlanetScale customers and we look forward to powering others through their digital transformations.”
Vitess is now serving billions of queries in production at Hubspot, Pinterest, Slack, Square, and YouTube. And with PlanetScale, enterprises can for the first time ever operationalize Vitess for scaling their databases and handle even the most demanding applications.
Businesses have been looking to address the challenge of scaling and interpreting data and there is a demand for growing migration toward the ease and speed of Kubernetes — which is an open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. And PlanetScale has also built a platform for deploying Vitess in Kubernetes easier for enterprises. And PlanetScale’s multi-cloud database-as-a-service called PlanetScale Cloud Database — built on the same platform — allows businesses to scale high-volume databases distributed over multiple regions and multiple cloud providers.
“I’ve been waiting for a platform like PlanetScale for the last decade,” said Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and board member of PlanetScale. “With its powerful offering, coupled with an all-star team, PlanetScale is uniquely positioned to upend the database market.”
PlanetScale also makes it easier for enterprises to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as it makes data locality seamless. And by allowing companies to re-shard databases on the fly, PlanetScale relocates user data for complying with regulations such as GDPR as well as safely migrate from other systems without major codebase changes.
Along with Andreessen Horowitz, PlanetScale’s backers are an all-star team of tech leaders, including Matt Cutts (administrator at United States Digital Service and former distinguished engineer at Google), Steve Chen (YouTube co-founder), Aditya Agarwal (former Dropbox CTO), Parisa Tabriz (senior engineering director at Google), Max Levchin (Affirm co-founder and CEO / PayPal co-founder), Ross Mason (MuleSoft founder and CTO), Adam D’Angelo (Quora founder and CEO), Sam Lambert (VP of Infrastructure Engineering at GitHub), Prasanna Srikhanta (angel investor), Shishir Mehrotra (co-founder and CEO of Coda), Michael Stoppelman (former SVP of Engineering at Yelp and angel investor), Start Smart Labs Founders Ellen Salisbury and Raymie Stata, and Ruchi Sanghvi (South Park Commons founder). Cloud Native Computing Foundation COO and CTO and VP of the Linux Foundation is an advisor at the company.
