Our $25M Series A: Building a Database and a Company to Last

A year ago, almost to the day, we announced our round of seed funding. That investment provided enough fuel for us to expand the team, move into a great new office in San Francisco in Jackson Square, continue working with our early customers, and launch FaunaDB to the public.

Today, I’m excited to announce another milestone. Fauna has raised $25M in series A financing, the largest series A ever for an operational database company. I’d like to explain the justification for this historic investment.

Since launch, FaunaDB Serverless Cloud has seen tremendous developer adoption. Less visibly, FaunaDB has also been embraced by large companies–those with the toughest requirements for distributed databases.

It turns out that enterprises need modern cloud-native architectures that are as safe as traditional pre-cloud databases. They need everything that the cloud promises: modern interfaces, developer-first delivery models, and lower TCO. But they also need traditional database features like ACID transactions, high availability, failover, predictable performance, and guaranteed durability. The balancing act is incredibly difficult.

After our launch, we found that companies in financial services and ecommerce often had the greatest need for a new database. But the need is not restricted to those industries. We are also seeing use cases in SaaS, IoT, gaming, and social media. Our new funding supports that.

This round was led by Point72 Ventures, which is the early-stage venture branch of Point72 Asset Management, funded by Steven Cohen and others. GV (formerly Google Ventures), Costanoa Ventures, and Afore Capital also participated, along with angel investors Beth Axelrod, Elizabeth Weil, and Jason Goldman. Existing investors also participated in the round, including CRV, Data Collective, Quest Venture Partners, the Webb Investment Network, and Ulu Ventures.

Scaling up

We raised a large round so that we can scale the company to match the size of the opportunity. We need great engineers, including distributed systems, full-stack, and front end. We’re looking for developer evangelists who can connect to our community with code. With highly qualified leads pouring in every day, we need an experienced sales director, enterprise salespeople, and solutions architects to help them succeed as customers.

If you need convincing, Chris Anderson gives some compelling reasons for joining Fauna in his blog post, Why I joined the next big database startup and you should too.

If you’re curious about the culture that we’re building at Fauna, our HR director, Amna Pervez, summed it up in her blog post, Not your regular office space.

We are intentionally building a culture that values diversity. Diverse teams are strong teams, and we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences. Our team includes women, men, mothers, fathers, the self-taught, the college-educated, and people of a variety of races, nationalities, ages, and socio-economic backgrounds.

If all this sounds good to you, check out our job descriptions and see if there’s a fit.

Thanks

I’m excited to welcome our new investors to the Fauna community. I’m grateful to Dan Gwak of Point72 Ventures for leading the round. I’m also grateful to the enthusiastic support of our seed investors who also joined this round of funding.

I’d like to thank everyone on our team, including my cofounder Matt, our staff, our advisors, our friends, our families, and especially my wife, for the support, sacrifice, and dedication required to get us to this point. And I would like to thank all our early customers for sharing our vision for modern data infrastructure.