Data infrastructure and analytics startup MotherDuck Corp. revealed today that it has raised $35 million in new funding at a $175 million valuation to hire more people and further its close collaboration with DuckDB.

A16z led the Series A round, with Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter also participating. Including the new funding, MotherDuck has raised $47.5 million to date.

Founded in May this year and only now coming out of stealth mode, MotherDuck offers a serverless data analytics platform based on the open-source database DuckDB. Founder Jordan Tigani worked at Google LLC for over a decade, with MotherDuck bringing together staff who had previously worked at Snowflake Inc., Databricks Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., Elastic NV, Firebolt Analytics Inc. and SingleStore Inc. who believe that the vast majority of workloads are not big data.

MotherDuck argues that big data is a term that has diminished in usefulness thanks to recent advances in hardware. Combining that belief with the accelerating adoption of DuckDB, the team realized it could deliver the elegance and speed of an in-process database with the collaboration and scalability of the cloud.

DuckDB is an in-process SQL online analytical processing database management system that’s analogous to SQLite for analytics workloads. The software has achieved widespread adoption in the data community based on its ability to run everywhere and query data from anywhere without pre-loading it, and for its fast execution of analytical queries based on the latest academic research.

MotherDuck brings the technology of DuckDB to more people to enable new use cases previously thought impossible at an unprecedented level of efficiency and performance.

“The fact is, ‘big data’ is dead; the simplicity and the ease of making sense of your data is a lot more important than its size,” Chief Executive Officer Tigani explained. “Laptops today are faster than a data warehouse. With advances in hardware, distributed computation is no longer necessary for most workloads.”

Tigani argues that cloud data providers are focused on the performance of 100-terabyte queries, which is irrelevant for the vast majority of users and also distracts from providers’ ability to deliver a great user experience. “We are taking the power of DuckDB and combining it with serverless analytics to help scale up and scale down with ease,” Tigani added.

The new funding will be used to build out MotherDuck’s engineering team and add a go-to-market function to provide a cloud analytics platform for organizations that want to use DuckDB in an evolved way.

Photo: Tambako The Jaguar/Flickr