SingleStore Inc., the database startup known until recently as MemSQL, today announced that it has closed a $80 million funding round led by Insight Partners.

Dell Technologies Inc. and Hercules Capital joined Insight in the round. A number of SingleStore’s existing investors took part as well, among them Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm.

San Francisco-based SingleStore sells a relational database that enables companies to process large volumes of information in real-time. Online retailers can use SingleStore to analyze website visitors’ activity and detect notable changes in shopping behavior as they happen. A manufacturer, in turn, could deploy machine learning models on the database to analyze real-time streams of sensory data from its industrial equipment. 

“We were working with a very large electronics retailer … and they could only get telemetry of their stores all over the world on an every-day basis,” SingleStore Chief Executive Officer Raj Verma recounted during an interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE in August, shortly before the startup officially changed its name from MemSQL. “Now their dashboards are powered by MemSQL and instead of running reports every 16 hours, they run it every second.”

What enables SingleStore to analyze data points as they arrive is a built-in ETL (which stands for extract, transform, load) tool dubbed Pipelines. The feature, the startup says, eliminates the need for the pricey standalone ETL tools usually required to perform real-time analytics with other databases. Besides ingesting information, Pipelines also automatically remove erroneous and duplicate items such as customer purchases accidentally logged twice by a company’s systems.

The database makes it possible to process historical data alongside the incoming real-time information streams. An online retailer could build a dashboard that displays customer orders in real time, while also using SingleStore to run analyses on purchase logs from the past five years. The benefit is that using a single database for both historical and real-time analytics is simpler than the traditional approach of using two separate systems.

SingleStore’s customer base includes the likes of Intel Corp., Cisco Systems Inc. and Macy’s Inc., among other big names. The startup has raised $238 million in total funding to date, including the $80 million round announced today. 

Using the extra capital, SingleStore plans to increase its headcount by 70% over the next year and continue growing its customer base. 

Image: SingleStore