Database startup Fauna Inc. today said that it has raised $27 million in funding to address the rise of serverless computing, which it argues has created a need for a new, likewise serverless approach to managing data. 

Madrona Venture Group led the investment. It was joined by Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund, CRV, Quest Ventures, Addition Ventures and several angel investors.

Fauna disclosed the funding in conjunction with the announcement of a leadership shakeup. Former Okta Inc. Chief Product Officer Eric Berg is joining the startup as chief executive officer, while former Snowflake Computing Inc. CEO Bob Muglia is becoming the chairman of the board. Muglia, who is also known for his early role in the development of Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server database, was one of the angel investors who backed Fauna’s funding round.

San Francisco-based Fauna offers a cloud-based “serverless” database service called FaunaDB. It’s positioning the product as an easier-to-use alternative to databases of the more standard variety. Developers can set up a database deployment in minutes and scale it up or down on demand, while FaunaDB manages the underlying infrastructure automatically.

The startup argues its product solves a key point of friction in application projects, particularly those that use serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda. Enterprise software teams are rapidly adopting serverless platforms because they automate manual infrastructure management tasks. However, even serverless applications need databases to store their information, and those databases often require manual management. 

Fauna is touting FaunaDB as the solution to this challenge. Developers can interact with the database via an application programming interface that allows them to write queries without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

“Developers are moving en masse to serverless architectures for new applications, marking the dawn of serverless as the next tool chain for building global, hyperscale apps,” said Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar. “Fauna has correctly identified serverless as the next frontier for cloud.”

Under the hood, FaunaDB is a relational database that provides security controls, support for the ACID information integrity standard and other staple database features. Though it’s relational, FaunaDB can accommodate unstructured data as well. It also provides integrations with popular serverless platforms such as AWS Lambda and Google Cloud Functions.

The API through which developers interact with FaunaDB, in turn, uses a technology called GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language created by Facebook Inc. that makes database operations more efficient by allowing applications to only fetch the minimal amount of information they need for a given task.

Fauna says that more than 25,000 developers use its database worldwide. The startup has raised about $60 million to date. 

“The new capital will be used to further accelerate our explosive user community growth, scale our go to market function, and continue to invest in innovation to drive the service forward.” Berg told SiliconANGLE.

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