Cloud database startup Tessell Inc. today announced that it has closed a $60 million funding round to support business growth.

WestBridge Capital led the Series B round with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, B37.vc and Rocketship.vc. The investment brings Tessell’s total outside funding to $94 million.

The major cloud providers offer features that make it easier to host databases on their platforms. However, those features don’t cover all the tasks involved in maintaining a large database environment. Tessell provides a database-as-a-service, or DaaS, platform that promises to simplify day-to-day maintenance tasks and cut costs in the process.

“Enterprises today struggle with siloed data and rigid database solutions that are incomplete, lacking performance, resilience, governance, and flexibility,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Bala Kuchibhotla.

The company’s platform can host several different types of data. It enables users to create cloud-based deployments of relational databases such as SQL Server and MySQL, which are well-suited for storing structured data. The platform also supports Milvus, an open-source vector store optimized to hold information for artificial intelligence models.

A component called the Availability Machine allows administrators to centrally regulate which user can access what record in a database. According to Tessell, it doubles as a backup tool. Availability Machine can automatically create backup copies of a database’s contents at set time intervals.

To reduce the risk of data loss further, customers can spread a database environment across multiple cloud regions. If one of the cloud regions experiences downtime, Tessell can reroute requests to the others.

Organizations measure data loss using a metric called RPO, or recovery point objective. If a database is backed up once a day, it has an RPO of 24 hours because no more than 24 hours’ worth of data can be lost in an outage. Tessell says that its platform’s data protection features provide “zero-time RPO” to reduce the business impact of outages.

The platform keeps customers’ data on cloud storage infrastructure powered by NVMe. That’s a high-speed storage protocol used to move data to and from flash drives. According to Tessell, its platform can use NVMe storage to process up to 2 million input and output operations per second for applications.

The company will use its newly announced funding round to enhance its platform. Tessel reportedly plans to develop AI features that will allow customers to launch queries with natural language prompts. Additionally, it’s working on integrations that will make it easier to move data into its platform from external sources.

Tessell plans to accelerate customer acquisition efforts in conjunction. It intends to establish a presence in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, as well as expand its go-to-market programs in the U.S. and India.

Image: Tessell