As open source database architecture continues to grow in popularity, one of the bigger developers in the area has picked up some funding to target the opportunity.
MariaDB Corporation, the company that develops solutions and contributes to the open-source SQL fork managed by the MariaDB Foundation, today announced that it has raised €25 million ($27 million) from the European Investment Bank (EIB), money that it plans to use to build out its sales team and more products for the platform, which today include the MariaDB Server, the MaxScale database proxy, the ColumnStore distributed data storage engine; and services like technical support, training and more.
Notably, the EIB is not a traditional VC, and this is not a typical Series C: it’s effectively a long-term loan, combined with some equity. “It is a (welcome) complementary alternative to traditional equity funding by PEs/VCs that often comes with more prescriptive terms,” said Kenneth Paqvalen, the CFO of the MariaDB Corporation. “It is attractive to us as it unlocks a significant amount of capital to fund our continued growth while at the same time keeping dilution to a minimum.”
The company and the EIC are both not commenting on valuation, however. “This kind of information was actually not relevant for our investment,” and EIB spokesperson said in response to the question.
From what we’ve heard from a source, MariaDB in a recent equity funding round had a targeted selling price of between $200 million and $250 million. It’s unclear how that range would have changed in the last year or so, or how that related to valuations set by investors. The same source said that the current funding was picked up at a five percent devaluation to current shareholders.
This brings the total raised by the MariaDB corp to around $67 million, including funding from when the firm was called SkySQL (it rebranded in 2014).
This is the first time that the EIB has backed MariaDB, which was founded and continues to have offices in Helsinki, Finland (with its second HQ in Menlo Park).
It’s part of a bigger strategic push by the European Commission, under its Investment Plan for Europe, to increase investment in European businesses. Sometimes referred to as the “Juncker Plan” after EC president Jean-Claude Juncker, who introduced it in 2014, the target has been to invest at least €315 billion ($344 billion) in European businesses between January 2015 and December 2017.
Tech investments are not the sole recipients of Juncker Plan funding, but it’s a clear opportunity — particularly when you consider the relative scarcity of funding for growth rounds for European startups, many of which have found it easier to raise seed rounds…