Database startup Yugabyte Inc. has loaded up its kitty, closing on a hefty $188 million round of funding today that brings its total amount raised to $291 million and its value to more than $1.3 billion.

Sapphire Ventures led the Series C round, which also included the participation of Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, strategic investor Wells Fargo & Co. and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, 8VC, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and others.

Five-year-old Yugabyte is the company behind the open-source YugabyteDB database. YugabyteDB is a specialized, high-performance distributed structured query language database that’s used to power global, internet-scale applications. It combines features including a high-performing document store, auto-sharding and per-shard distributed consensus replication with multishard automicity, consistency, isolation and durability transactions.

Yugabyte’s best attribute is that it delivers SQL and NoSQL capabilities, meaning it can work with structured and unstructured data. Companies can standardize on a single, distributed database that’s able to support a wide range of workloads. So there’s no need to mess around with multiple databases, which should lead to faster application development times and reduced complexity.

Yugabyte is used by applications that require low query latency, extreme resilience against failures and global data distribution. The database is cloud-native, which means it can be deployed on any private or public cloud platform as well as Kubernetes environments.

Sapphire Ventures President and Partner Jai Das said the real beauty of YugabyteDB lies in its power and simplicity, which means it can be adopted easily by any organization.

“Regardless of whether you’re a large enterprise modernizing your existing data infrastructure, a startup born in the cloud or something in between, Yugabyte’s cloud-native, open-source, geographically distributed SQL database can run on any cloud or Kubernetes environment,” Das said.

Although the primary platform is open-source, Yugabyte makes money from commercial tools that include the self-managed Yugabyte Platform, which can run on-premises or in the cloud, and Yugabyte Cloud, which is a fully managed, cloud-only version of the database that runs on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

The capabilities of YugabyteDB have won over a number of big enterprises, with the likes of Wells Fargo, Kroger Co., Hudson River Trading and Narvar Inc. all advocates of the platform. Yugabyte claims to have hundreds of customers in the retail, financial services and telecommunications sectors, with more than 1,200 organizations signing up to use Yugabyte Cloud since that platform was launched last year.

The company clearly has room to grow much more, though. Adoption of YugabyteDB in the open-source community has exploded with more than a million clusters up and running across 80 countries, Yugabyte said.

Chief Executive Bill Cook said he’s anticipating more growth as organizations that embrace digital transformation quickly find themselves needing a cloud-native database that can scale as they grow. “YugabyteDB was built to address this expanding market and to meet the current and future needs of any business, regardless of their cloud infrastructure,” he said.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc., told SiliconANGLE that today’s round underscores how innovation in the database market has accelerated, fueled by widespread adoption of cloud architectures. The shift to the cloud, he said, means that “enterprises need to process lots more data of higher variety than before, and do it at greater velocity.”

Yugabyte said it plans to use the new capital to grow its field and engineering teams and expand its services into new markets.

Image: Yugabyte