DBOS Inc., a new startup led by prominent computer scientists, launched today with $8.5 million in seed funding and an operating system designed to challenge Linux.

Engine Ventures led the investment. Construct Capital, Sinewave and Gutbrain Ventures participated as well.

DBOS was founded last April by prominent computer scientists Michael Stonebraker and Matei Zaharia. Stonebraker, a Turing Award recipient, developed one of the earliest relational databases in 1973 and later launched more than a half-dozen data management companies. Zaharia, in turn, is the creator of Apache Spark as well as Databricks Inc.’s chief technology officer.

“The idea for DBOS (DataBase oriented Operating System) originated 3 years ago with my realization that the state an operating system must maintain (files, processes, threads, messages, etc.) has increased in size by about 6 orders of magnitude since I began using Unix on a PDP-11/40 in 1973,” Stonebraker detailed in a blog post today. “As such, storing OS state is a database problem.”

DBOS has developed an operating system, also called DBOS, that ships with a built-in relational database. That database doesn’t merely store user information but also powers several of the platform’s key components. DBOS implements multiple operating system features in SQL, a query syntax originally created for tasks such as merging database tables. 

The company says that its platform can provide similar performance as Linux. The difference, according to Stonebraker, is that DBOS offers several features not available in its more established open-source rival.

Linux doesn’t provide all the software tools necessary to build a distributed application environment spanning multiple servers. As a result, companies often use the operating system together with external frameworks such as Kubernetes. DBOS says that its platform can power distributed application environments without relying on Kubernetes, which can potentially ease day-to-day maintenance operations.

Another feature that sets DBOS apart is the way it stores operating system information. This information comprises the error logs and other data points that the platform collects while running applications. According to DBOS, its operating system enables software teams to retrieve such information with SQL queries.

Many developers are familiar with SQL and it’s considered relatively simple to use. As a result, DBOS’ built-in support for the syntax makes it easier for developers to access operating system data. That data is useful for tasks such as troubleshooting application performance issues.

DBOS plans to monetize its operating system with a service called DBOS Cloud that also debuted today. The offering provides a managed environment for running applications written in TypeScript, a popular programming language.

Applications sometimes interrupt their work because of technical issues such as hardware outages. To equip a workload with the ability to pick up where it left off, developers must write highly complicated code that can take months to implement. According to DBOS, DBOS Cloud removes the need for such code with features that automatically help applications recover after an outage.

“To see why this is important, consider the ‘confirm order’ button in a food delivery app,” Stonebraker wrote in today’s blog post. “It needs to place an order at a restaurant, await confirmation, process payment, and request a delivery driver. If the program is interrupted during any of these steps, it needs to resume from where it left off (or the order is lost) without repeating any completed steps (or the customer may be charged twice.”

DBO Cloud also includes a feature the company describes as a “time travel debugger.” According to DBO, the feature allows developers to reproduce bugs encouraged by a production application and analyze them to find the root cause.

The $8.5 million funding round the company announced today will help support its product development efforts. DBO plans to update DBO Cloud with features that can automatically detect cyberattacks, as well as recover information lost because of a breach or technical errors. The company will also add observability dashboards to ease the task of troubleshooting technical issues.

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