Open-source database startup SurrealDB Inc. said today it has closed on a $20 million funding investment that will fund its ambitions to disrupt the big data industry.

The round, led by FirstMark and Georgian with participation from Crew Capital and Alumni Ventures, brings the company’s total amount raised to date to $26 million.

The startup is the creator of what it calls a “multi-model database,” which consolidates various database types into a single platform, eliminating the need for enterprises and application developers to use multiple systems for different types of data.

The cloud-based SurrealDB enables developers to adapt to various data requirements on the fly. It’s one of the fastest-growing open-source database projects on GitHub, having earned more than 25,000 stars. Along with today’s funding round, the startup’s flagship platform, SurrealDB Cloud, is now available in beta.

The startup claims that its platform can help developers to build modern, real-time applications faster and in a more affordable way. It’s a fully managed offering that minimizes backend infrastructure management and application programming interface creation, while supporting every kind of data model and cloud platform.

SurrealDB can handle traditional documents, graph, transactional, time-series, temporal and vector data, making it an ideal platform for any kind of application, including artificial intelligence software. It combines all of these data modalities into a single, coherent system.

Such a system may well be appealing, because SurrealDB claims that the average organization manages three or four databases to cater to the various data models they use. That results in greater costs and complexity that has a negative impact on developer productivity.

The problem is that developers are forced to spend much of their time on infrastructure management tasks for each database. They must also learn the various programming languages required to interact with each different database.

SurrealDB’s cloud platform abstracts away the infrastructure management headaches. It has been built entirely on Rust, a general-purpose programming language that emphasizes security, speed and concurrency. Security is another focus area for SurrealDB, which provides advanced access controls and indexing for artificial intelligence and model processing workloads.

SurrealDB co-founder and Chief Executive Tobie Morgan Hitchcock said it was his belief in creating software that enables developers to focus on building that inspired him to create SurrealDB.

“The support and enthusiasm from our community have been instrumental to our growth and success,” he added. “We are committed to open-source development, and will continue to innovate and provide powerful, accessible tools that empower developers worldwide.”

FirstMark Partner Matt Turck said that in the previous decade, the database industry transformed with the emergence of a multitude of highly specialized databases, aimed at handling different types of data. Although these new databases introduced some useful functionality that developers didn’t have before, they also increased complexity, he said.

“The pendulum has now swung back to rebundling and simplification,” Turck explained. “SurrealDB is rapidly emerging as the leader of that trend, offering tremendous versatility and performance.”

Image: SurrealDB