Cockroach Labs, the startup behind the funky-sounding CockroachDB database, last week announced its first round of funding, a series A totaling $6.25 million.

The round was led by Benchmark, whose lead investor Peter Fenton joins the board of Cockroach Labs as part of the arrangement. Fenton is well known for having backed a number of highly successful open-source startups, such as Docker Inc., Hortonworks Inc., Zimbra Inc. and others. Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and FirstMark Capital also participated in the round.

The deal is significant enough that CockroachDB emerges from nowhere as one of the NoSQL databases to watch – up there alongside software more well known outfits like Basho Technologies Inc., Couchbase Inc., DataStax Inc., and of course, MongoDB Inc.

So what’s different about CockroachDB? Well, besides the unusual name, Cockroach Labs says its platform is designed for high scalability. It’s a distributed, transactional key-value store that keeps copies of data consistent in multiple places, ensuring that data is available whenever it’s needed.

Spencer Kimball, CEO of Cockroach Labs, told Information Week that the database shares a lot of characteristics with Spanner, a database system used by Google to faciliate its search services. Spanner helps make Google Search tick by ensuring that indexes of web crawler information are constantly available, and with split-second timing it manages all of the ad servings that accompany searches.

According to Kimball, many enterprises would love to use Spanner for their own ends, if only they could. But sadly for them, Spanner is not open-source and in any case, it relies on other technologies like Colossus in order to work.

CockroachDB is essentially trying to emulate Spanner, providing the same scalability, survivability and data integrity. Spanner’s data is consistent all over the world, with updates managed by an atomic clock that doesn’t rely on the NTP protocol. Most CockroachDB users won’t need the atomic clock systems and so it’s not bothered about emulating that part.

Kimball says the aim of CockroachDB is to provide a distributed database that’s both highly survivable and capable of precisely synchronizing the data in its system, no matter where that data resides. Data consistency is still a distant goal for most NoSQL systems, which is why CockroachDB is such a viable alternative, Kimball explained. Most NoSQL systems can only claim “eventual consistency”, and that makes transactions a big problem. Users can’t be sure the data used in a transaction attempt reflects the most recent changes in the system. Precise, data consistency requires assured transactions that finish updating the system before any reads are executed against the target data.

As for what inspired the name CockroachDB, Cockroach Labs’ founders Kimball, Ben Darnell, and Peter Mattis penned the following passage in a blog post:

“If you can get past their grotesque outer aspect, you’ve got to give them credit for sheer resilience. You’ve heard the theory that cockroaches will be the only survivors post-apocalypse? Turns out modern database systems have a lot to gain by emulating one of nature’s oldest and most successful designs. Survive, replicate, proliferate. That’s been the cockroach model for geological ages, and it’s ours too. It doesn’t hurt that the name itself is resilient to being forgotten.”

Considering Cockroach Labs was only formed this year, things are moving pretty fast. The company currently boasts nine engineers, and is hoping to have around 15-20 staff on hand by the end of the year.

“We are going to be laser-focused on developer adoption and building the open source community,” Kimball said in an email to VentureBeat.

Image credit: Gerald Yuvallos via Flickr.com