Fauna Inc., an emerging database provider based in San Francisco, is attracting serious interest in the venture capital community.

The startup today announced that it has landed a $25 million financing round from a consortium featuring nearly a dozen investors. Notable participants include Alphabet Inc.’s GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), CRV and Data Collective.

Fauna sells what it describes as an “adaptive operational database” that can support a wide range of use cases. Dubbed FaunaDB, the system can store traditional business records organized into rows and columns as well as unstructured data such as video content. An extensive set of query options provides the ability to interact with the information in the way that is most suitable for a project.

The feature set includes several specialized capabilities that aren’t natively supported in more traditional databases. Among them is the ability to run graph functions, which are commonly used to discover relationships among different records. 

According to Fauna, these features enable FaunaDB to power most of everything from mobile apps to financial services and large-scale analytics projects. As a result, the system could potentially remove the need for large companies to use multiple kinds of databases to support their workloads. Fewer databases to manage in turn means lower overhead.

Fauna is one of several data management startups to have gone down the multipurpose route. Another is MemSQL Inc., which offers a platform that can handle both real-time information streams and complex historical analyses.  

FaunaDB comes in two editions. The first is a cloud service that can automatically scale up or down according to the requirements of the applications running on top. The other version is an on-premises package that organizations may install on their own infrastructure.

Nvidia Corp. is among the first companies to deploy FaunaDB in production. The chip giant is reportedly using the database as part of the server-side environment that supports its GeoForce Experience software, which it says is installed on tens of millions of personal computers.

Fauna has raised over $32 million in funding to date.

Image: mcmurryjulie/Pixabay