SingleStore Inc., a startup with a database used by tech giants such as Intel Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., today announced that it has raised $80 million in fresh funding from a consortium of prominent investors.

Insight Partners led the consortium. The firm was joined by Khosla Ventures, Rev IV and Glynn Capital, as well as the venture capital arms of Dell Technologies Inc. and Google LLC. Dell is not only an investor in SingleStore but also a customer through its Dell EMC subsidiary.

The investment comes less than a year after the database startup’s previous funding round. “In only nine months the company’s value has grown by 70% to just shy of a billion dollars,” said SingleStore Chief Executive Officer Raj Verma. “The new investments will go toward innovation and driving growth by helping customers address database sprawl.”

Normally, companies use separate databases for their transactional and analytical workloads. Transactional workloads are applications that an enterprise uses to perform day-to-day tasks such as processing product orders. Analytical workloads, meanwhile, are the applications that organizations use to extract business insights such as new sales opportunities from their business information.

The reason separate databases are often needed for the two types of workloads is that they have different technical requirements. A transactional application that processes product orders, for example, needs the ability to retrieve specific information rapidly so employees can quickly bring up the product orders they need for their work. An analytics workload has a different set of requirements: Some analytics tools require the ability to process billions of rows of data at a time to extract business insights.

The need to maintain separate databases for transactional and analytics workloads is a source of complexity at large companies. The more databases there are, the more work is required to keep them running smoothly. Application development becomes more complicated as well. To write efficient software, a company’s developers have to familiarize themselves with the unique features of each database.

SingleStore is working to ease the challenge. The startup has built a database, also called SingleStore, that supports both transactional and analytics workloads, which allows companies to replace the multiple databases they might otherwise use for the task with a single system. The result, the startup argues, is a decrease in operational complexity for enterprises that ultimately helps them extract more value from their data.

SingleStore promises to simplify other aspects of the data management workflow as well. Extracting value from business information requires more than just a database. Enterprises also need software that can help them pull records from internal systems into their database for processing.

The task is often performed using software products known as ETL, or extract, transform and load tools. SingleStore provides a feature called Pipelines that removes the need to deploy separate ETL products in some cases and thus reduces the number of moving parts in a company’s data environment, which simplifies operations.

SingleStore provides its database in two editions: a standalone software product that companies can deploy on their own and a managed cloud service.

The startup disclosed today that the cloud service is seeing triple-digit growth but didn’t share absolute numbers. SingleStore will use the capital from its latest funding round to continue driving adoption of the offering and enhance the customer experience. 

“All applications today are data-intensive, and reducing complexity and cost across data estates will continue to be a priority, which is why we think SingleStore has a competitive advantage in this space,” said Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. “SingleStore is able to reduce data sprawl, run anywhere and run faster with a single database, replacing legacy databases with the modern cloud.”

SingleStore has raised more than $260 million in funding to date.

Image: SingleStore