UPDATED 16:25 EDT / MAY 05 2021

BIG DATA

After $40M round, database startup Timescale moves to accelerate feature roadmap

Time-series database maker Timescale Inc. today disclosed that it has received $40 million in fresh funding from an investor group led by Redpoint Ventures.

The New York-based startup said that it plans to step up product development efforts following the capital injection. Timescale is preparing to launch more than 10 enhancements to its namesake database this month and, looking further ahead, intends to continue accelerating the pace of feature releases.

Timescale’s database is designed for storing files that need to be organized in the order they were generated. A software development team, for instance, might have a collection of application logs that describe how much latency the corporate accounting system experienced during a given week. Timescale can organize the logs from earliest to latest to let developers create a timeline of how latency fluctuated during the week, which makes it possible to identify the times when users were seeing the biggest delays.

Application troubleshooting is not the only use case for time-series databases. Organizations in the financial sector can use Timescale to monitor how the value of stocks changes over time. Manufacturers and other industrial companies, in turn, use the database to collect sensory measurements from their equipment for tasks such as monitoring hardware reliability.

Under the hood, Timescale is based on the open-source PostgreSQL relational database. PostgreSQL is one of the most popular databases in its category and also among the earliest: the system traces its roots back more than 30 years to a project at the University of California at Berkeley.

Building its product on PostgreSQL allowed Timescale to bring over the database’s time-tested reliability and data management features for customers. Another benefit is that, thanks to its popularity, PostgreSQL is compatible with a wide variety of external database management tools developers can use to ease day-to-day work.

Timescale has added on its own optimizations to provide support for time-series information and to speed up analytics. The startup’s database makes queries happen in parallel so multiple analyses can be carried out at once instead of one after another. It also prepares certain common query results in advance to avoid the delay of calculating them from scratch for every single request. According to Timescale, the result is 10 to 100 times faster performance than standard PostgreSQL.

The startup also promises the ability to ingest millions of individual data points per second using just a single server. When scaled across multiple machines, Timescale says that the database is capable of processing 10 million data points per second or more.

Timescale gives away the database for free and generates revenue through a managed cloud version that automates day-to-day maintenance tasks. Worldwide, Timescale says, free and paid users are running more than 2 million active databases.

Alongside Redpoint Ventures, the startup’s $40 million round saw the participation of existing investors Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. The group has provided Timescale with more than $70 million in capital to date, including its earlier rounds.

Photo: Unsplash

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