Graph-relational database developer EdgeDB Inc. is gearing up for prime time after closing on a $15 million early-stage round of funding ahead of its official launch early next year.

Today’s Series A round was led by Nava Ventures and Accel and included participation from a number of well-known tech companies, including Vercel Inc., Google LLC’s Firebase, Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub, IBM Corp., OpenAI LLC and Netlify Inc.

EdgeDB launched its graph-relational database in beta back in 2019, saying at the time it was reimagining the traditional relational database with a vastly improved developer experience. The open-source EdgeDB offering is designed to address some of the key limitations of Structured Query Language and relational schema modeling while also boosting performance. Although it’s still a relational database at its core, it’s based on an object-oriented data model with a strict graph schema and modern query language to ensure ease of use.

As the company explains, the main aim of EdgeDB is to solve the hard design problems that make existing databases onerous to use. It’s powered by the Postgre query engine under the hood, but the main difference is that it thinks about schema the same way as developers do — in other words, as objects with properties connected by links.

Thus, it can be thought of as an object-oriented data model, or a graph database with a strict schema. A key advantage is that it uses syntax that’s familiar to developers to represent selection sets, scope, structure and property assignment. In addition, EdgeDB queries using EdgeQL are fully composable, and they return a structured result object rather than a list of rows — eliminating the need for a third-party object-relational mapping solution to denormalize the results.

General availability of EdgeDB is scheduled for the first quarter of next year. At launch, it will feature native integrations with GitHub, Vercel and Netlify, with zero-configuration and a streamlined user interface and DevOps tools. In addition, EdgeDB will provide tools for schema migrations and rich client libraries for mainstream programming languages, the company said.

Even in beta, EdgeDB has proven to be extremely popular with more than 20,000 monthly active users and more than 9,500 stars on GitHub. So big things are expected with its official launch in the coming months.

Nava Ventures founder Freddie Martignetti said one of the problems with existing relational databases is that they lack composability in their data models and query languages. “They are unnecessarily slow and hard to build with,” he said. “EdgeDB was built from the ground up with the modern developer in mind, by co-founders who understand the problem first-hand,” he said.

Today’s funding will be used to expand EdgeDB’s development team and build out the company’s commercial offering, EdgeDB Cloud, ahead of the official launch.

EdgeDB co-founder and Chief Executive Yury Selivanov said he believes databases have been and always will be the defining piece of any technological stack.

“While there has been a lot of activity and interesting developments in databases in the past decade, relational databases are built on a model that is decades old and has become increasingly inadequate for the rapidly transforming software development field,” Selivanov said. “Organizations are looking for modern, scalable systems that can help reduce costs while accelerating development, which is why we built EdgeDB.”

Image: EdgeDB