Basho Technologies Inc., the creator of the Riak NoSQL database and Riak CS cloud-storage system, announced a $25 million series G round of funding led by Georgetown Partners, taking the total amount of investment it’s raised to almost $60 million since its founding in 2008.

Basho claims that the Riak database, which it offers as an open-source project, has seen a significant uptake in enterprise adoption over the last year and is now used by more than 30 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Although Basho is smaller than NoSQL rivals like Couchbase, Inc., DataStax, Inc. and MongoDB, Inc., its success underlines the traction the sector has been getting in the last couple of years.

The immediate focus of the next couple of months is building out the Riak ecosystem, said CEO Adam Wray, who  took over the reins in March. Basho hopes to attract both regional players that can help carry its platform to new markets and contribute to the goal of increasing the top line, as well more strategic partners capable of adding value in other areas. But the company isn’t leaving all the heavy lifting to the channel.

Basho also plans to invest some of the new capital in expanding internal development efforts, with Wray hinting at plans to add other options beyond the key-value and object stores currently available to customers. That puts the company on a similar trajectory as FoundationDB, Inc., another new-generation database provider that is currently working to augument its ultra-reliable system with more ways to store information.

Unlike FoundationDB, Riak does not fully meet the ACID criteria for consistent transaction processing, but that hasn’t stopped Basho from winning over mission-critical workloads. One of the company’s most notable achievements in that area in the past year was replacing Oracle as the database supplier for UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which handles millions of medical records that the nation can’t afford becoming compromised.

Wray said half of Riak’s wins involve replacing an existing database, most commonly MySQL.  Convincing an organization such as the NHS to standardize their current and future mission-critical processors on a relatively new platform such as Riak can sometimes prove a challenge, he noted, but that hasn’t hampered the company’s growth.

Basho hasn’t raised nearly as much capital as some of its rivals. For example, MongoDB recently secured $80 million, having previously announced a $150 million funding round in October, 2013. Nevertheless Basho claims its business is booming, with new Riak deployments in industries such as advertising, financial services, healthcare and retail. In an interview with TechCrunch, Wray claimed an 88 percent increase in bookings over the last 12 months.

The new funding round comes after Basho launched Riak Enterprise 2.0 in September, swapping out its old Riak search engine with the Apache Solr engine in order to simplify integration external software via APIs. In addition, Riak Enterprise 2.0 also saw the introduction of new data types, including flags, maps, registers and sets, in a move that simplifies application development.

While Riak may never compete with the likes of MongoDB in sheer size, Basho could one day be a prime acquisition target for a larger vendor looking to add a NoSQL database to its books. With a smaller venture capital commitment to attend to, the company’s price tag will likely be more attractive than that of its rivals.

Maria Deutscher contributed to this report.

image courtesy of Basho Technologies