Establishing a foothold in a segment as competitive as the database industry can be difficult for an emerging player, but several of the world’s leading tech companies are betting that ScyllaDB Ltd. has a strong enough value proposition to pull it off.

The startup today secured $16 million in funding from Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Qualcomm Technologies Inc., data storage manufacturer Western Digital Corp and a couple of institutional funds. Their investment will fuel ScyllaDB’s efforts to commercialize its namesake NoSQL store, which stands out from the competition in a number of ways. Perhaps most notably, the system is based on another database called Apache Cassandra that’s already well-established in its own right.

ScyllaDB co-founders Dor Laor and Avi Kivity undertook the effort in a bid to address the shortcomings that cause Cassandra to struggle with many computationally intensive workloads. As part of the project, the startup rewrote the database in C++ and removed its reliance on slow external caches for storing frequently-used information. Lastly, ScyllaDB tweaked how requests are processed to make better use of hardware resources.

The startup’s system implements what is known as a shared-nothing model to distribute work across processor cores in a way that allows their activities to be coordinated more easily, and thus more efficiently, than with Cassandra’s approach. As a result, ScyllaDB frees up computational capacity for carrying out the given request at hand, which produces a significant speed boost.

The startup claims that its database can provide up to 10 times better performance than Cassandra while keeping latency in the sub-millisecond range. ScyllaDB’s website displays several benchmark tests that show its system running faster under a variety of different operational conditions. Moreover, the startup has kept the high-availability features and scalability that made Cassandra popular in the first place. 

In an effort to increase the appeal of ScyllaDB even further, co-founders Laor and Kivity also opted to retain Cassandra’s programming interface during the re-write, which means that users can upgrade their existing deployments with relatively little effort. The system is available in an open-source version and a commercial edition that includes technical support along with a number of other conveniences.

The startup claims that about two dozen companies have already made the switch. Notable customers include Outbrain Inc., Investing.com and IBM Corp., which relies on ScyllaDB to support its cloud-based Watson Data Platform.

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