Database upstart ScyllaDB Inc., said today it has closed on a $43 million round of funding as it looks to take on rivals such as MongoDB Inc. by providing an easier way for enterprises to scale their data workloads.

Today’s round was co-led by Eight Roads Ventures and AB Private Credit Investors, and saw participation from others such as TLV Partners, Magma Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.

It has been a while since ScyllaDB last attracted any major funding, but the company reckons it has still managed to evolve its open-source NoSQL database into one of the fastest and most scalable such offerings around.

The ScyllaDB database is based on the open-source Apache Cassandra project, which is a distributed, wide-column store database management system that was originally developed by Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook to handle large amounts of data across numerous commodity servers.

ScyllaDB’s founders took Apache Cassandra and rewrote that database in a different programming language. With that, they made a number of performance-boosting changes under the hood. As a result, ScyllaDB claims, its namesake database is 10 times faster than Cassandra and has much lower latency.

ScyllaDB is used by high-profile customers such as Discord Inc., Epic Games Inc. and Palo Alto Networks Inc. They rely on it to perform specialized tasks such as processing time-series data, which refers to information that must be processed chronologically. It’s also widely used as a graph store, thanks to its ability to record the relationships among different data points, which is helpful for things such as cybersecurity and social media analysis.

The startup reckons it has hit a real purple patch of late, with more than 100% year-over-year revenue growth from its new database-as-a-service offering, and overall revenue growth of more than 800%, off an undisclosed base. It’s this momentous growth that helped ScyllaDB land a spot on Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd.’s Technology Fast 500 Index, the company said.

It says one of the reasons it’s growing so fast is that many of its new users previously relied on MongoDB’s NoSQL database, only to hit barriers when trying to scale up with that platform. The startup cites independent benchmark tests on Bench Ant that show its platform has up to 68-times lower latency than MongoDB, 20 times higher throughput and 19 times better price/performance ratio.

According to ScyllaDB, the superior performance in those tests is thanks to its different database architecture, which provides horizontal scalability for data-intensive workloads. It says enterprises also use its database to replace Cassandra, DynamoDB and other platforms that struggle to scale up.

“ScyllaDB is architected through its shard-per-core design to capitalize on continuing hardware innovations,” said ScyllaDB co-founder and Chief Executive Dor Laor.

Davor Hebel, managing partner at Eight Roads Ventures, shed more light on ScyllaDB’s growth. He explained that the overall NoSQL database market is now worth more than $13 billion globally. Despite that, he explained, it’s still growing at a rate of more than 20% every year, even with the poor economy. As such, it’s one of the fastest-growing segments in the entire software industry. “We have been impressed by the team’s execution since our original investment in 2019,” he added.

Image: ScyllaDB