MemSQL Inc., developer of a scalable SQL-based in-memory distributed database, closed an over-subscribed series C financing round of $36 million, bringing its total funding to $85 million and setting the stage for international expansion.

Previous investors Accel Partners LP, Khosla Ventures LLC, Data Collective, IA Ventures and First Round Capital all bought in to the latest round, along with new investors REV Venture Partners Ltd. and Caffeinated Capital. REV brings international experience that MemSQL CEO and co-founder Eric Frenkiel said the company covets.

“We’ve been mainly focused on North America so far, but we do have customers on almost every continent now,” he said. “It’s a function of inbound interest in the software.”

MemSQL is all about speedy access to big data using the ubiquitous SQL query language. Last month the company announced a major new release that improves query speed by a factor of 10 through low-latency compilation, a feature that turbocharges data exploration. MemSQL also supports both transaction processing and analytics on the same engine, eliminating the need for a time-consuming extract/transform/load procedure and enabling users to analyze more recent data.

The company has a free version of its database, but the software isn’t open source. However, MemSQL does ship with the open-source Apache Spark in-memory analytics engine and integrates natively with the Apache Kafka message broker. Both have been on a rocket ride over the past year due to growing interest in streaming and near-real-time analytics.

“Real-time is where a lot of value is being realized,” Frenkiel said. “Customers want to consume and analyze as much data as possible and still get results while the data is fresh. They no longer have to buy big database appliances to do that.” He said MemSQL’s biggest vertical markets are financial services and advertising technology, where split-second decision-making is critical.

MemSQL could have reach profitability without latest funding round, but the terms were too good to pass up, Frenkiel said. The company has no immediate new product plans, given that its version 5 release is only now coming to market, but he said the company sees opportunities in real-time business intelligence dashboards and machine learning.