Database startup Cockroach Labs Inc. today announced that it has raised $86.6 million in funding from a roster of blue-chip investors, among them Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm and Sequoia Capital.

Cockroach Labs said it plans to use the cash to support the continued development of its namesake CockroachDB platform. The platform, which is used by the likes of Apple Inc. and Tesla Inc., is an open-source SQL database equipped with resilience features designed to make it resistant to outages.

CockroachDB follows the ACID standard, a set of technical criteria that ensure a database doesn’t corrupt records even if an operation such as a data edit is interrupted. The platform also has a feature called multi-active availability that reduces the risk of such interruptions happening in the first place. The feature allows CockroachDB clusters to avoid downtime when a constituent database instance goes down by rerouting requests designated for that instance to the remaining nodes.

Under the hood, CockroachDB implements concepts from the Spanner database developed by Google LLC. Cockroach Labs founders Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball and Ben Darnell (pictured) worked in technical roles at the search giant before launching the startup in 2015. 

Cockroach Labs offers its database under an open-source license and makes money through a commercial version that has extra features such as a built-in backup tool. The startup also sells a managed cloud edition that companies can deploy on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform.

Cockroach Labs said today that the number of organizations using its paid products has nearly tripled in the past year. It also claims that first-year adopters on average double their usage after coming aboard, which would mean it’s not only adding more customers but also making more revenue from existing ones.

The startup’s sales momentum helps explain why it has managed to raise $88.6 million in a segment as competitive as the database market. Cockroach Labs competes not only with the likes of Oracle Corp. but also Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google, on whose platforms it offers the cloud version of its database. If the startup in the future adds support for the industry’s third major public cloud, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, CockroachDB will also have to take on Azure SQL Database.

Cockroach Labs has raised $195 million in funding to date. In addition to GV and Sequoia, today’s round also saw the participation of Altimeter Capital, Bond, Benchmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Tiger Capital.

Despite the large number of incumbent players in the data management market, several startup players besides Cockroach Labs have also raised funding recently. In February, cloud-based data warehouse provider Snowflake Inc. landed a $479 million round. Aerospike Inc., the startup behind the in-memory NoSQL store of the same name, bagged $32 million late last year.

Photo: Cockroach Labs