Cockroach Labs Inc., a fast-growing database startup led by former Google LLC engineers, today announced that it has closed $55 million in fresh funding.

The round was co-led by Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm, Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global. They were joined by five other institutional backers, including Redpoint Ventures, which was the biggest investor in Cockroach Labs’ previous $27 million raise two years ago. The startup has raked in over $108 million from investors to date.

New York-based Cockroach Labs is the maker of CockroachDB, an open-source SQL database whose unusual name is a nod to its resilience. The system is built to maintain the integrity of records even in the event of an outage. It does so by implementing core concepts from the Spanner database created by Google, where Cockroach Labs co-founders Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball and Ben Darnell (pictured) worked in technical roles before launching the startup.

At the heart of the system is a feature called multi-active replication. All the CockroachDB instances in a deployment are equally capable of reading and writing data, which means that if one node becomes unavailable, the others can simply redistribute the load among them. 

The system also makes sure that information doesn’t get corrupted when a failure occurs. During an outage, a database instance stops syncing data changes with the other nodes, which can create a situation where two instances have two different versions of the same record once everything is back up and running. CockroachDB avoids such discrepancies by only marking records as valid if they’re consistent across the majority of the instances in a deployment.

The database can run both in the cloud and on-premises. Alongside the core open-source version, Cockroach Labs offers a commercial enterprise edition that is available as a standalone download or a fully managed cloud service. It includes additional features such as the ability to specify the geographic location where different sets of records should be stored, which simplifies regulatory compliance. 

Tens of thousands of developers have downloaded CockroachDB as of June. The startup’s paying user base consists of over 50 enterprise customers, a number that is on the rise: CockroachDB claims that its revenue has been doubling quarter-over-quarter since last year. 

The startup will use the new $55 million in funding to expand  customer acquisition efforts and hire more engineers. 

Photo: Cockroach Labs