Today we’re delighted to announce our Series A! We’ve raised $8M to fund development, grow the RethinkDB community, and ultimately make database tools feel indistinguishable from magic.

Here’s what we’re planning to accomplish with this new development budget:

Get to a long-term support release : Since we first shipped the beta version of RethinkDB we’ve been humbled by the feedback, support, and encouragement from our users. Over the past thirteen months we’ve shipped ten new releases, fixed hundreds of bugs, and added dozens of new features. We’re now hard at work polishing the final rough edges in preparation for the upcoming LTS release.

Grow the community: An amazing community has sprung up around RethinkDB over the past year. We’re incredibly grateful to all the people who’ve spent time developing and supporting client drivers for 15 different languages, building frameworks, ORMs, and designing new admin tools. We’re now in a position to give back to our community by sponsoring conferences, promoting community projects, improving documentation, and introducing more developers to RethinkDB.

Offer commercial support: Thousands of developers are already building applications backed by RethinkDB; from mobile games to gene sequence analysis, and everything in between. In the coming months we’ll be adding commercial support options to give these teams everything they need to confidently use RethinkDB in production deployments.)

We’re also excited to welcome Peter Bell from Highland Capital Partners to our board. Peter has a deep background in infrastructure technology and led the investment, joined by Josh Stein from DFJ, and the amazing team at Webb Investment Network (Maynard Webb’s early stage investment fund) — all incredibly supportive early seed investors in RethinkDB. We’re excited to continue working with them to build a long-term open-source technology company.

In the meantime, you can look forward to an open and rapid development process, new features, and steady improvements to performance and reliability. The team is already hard at work on the upcoming 1.12 release — check out the GitHub milestone, and send us your feedback!