Today, Crate announced that Sunstone and DFJ Esprit led the company’s EUR 1.5M seed financing round. This is my first investment as Partner at DFJ Esprit, and I’m absolutely delighted to be working with the exceptional team at Crate and with Nikolaj Nyholm, our partner at Sunstone.

So why did we invest in Crate?

Exceptional team with deep domain knowledge. Jodok Batlogg, who founded Crate, is one of Europe’s leading big data practitioners, having served as CTO for both StudiVZ (over 15M users at the peak) and SevenLoad. Additionally, Jodok is a leading open source contributor (to both the Zope web server and the Plone CMS). Crate’s CTO, Bernd Dorn, is a true database guru, and Christian Lutz is an experienced operator with a track record of, quite literally, doing the impossible (in this case, rescuing Polaroid).

Big market screaming out in pain. No matter how you slice it, the database market is massive and evolving. It’s also a market that has received a disproportionate share of VC investment, with VCs plowing funding into a long list of database related market segments including: NoSQL, Hadoop, graph databases, open-source SQL, cloud-based databases, visualization, etc. But for all of that innovation, the process of setting up and running very large database remains either expensive or complicated. Expensive because large databases still often require expensive hardware and/or licenses. Complicated because setting up a massive cluster of commodity machines to run a database requires a ton of administrative work and expertise that not a lot of people have. It’s this administrative complexity that Crate is out to eliminate – and that’s the real story behind the investment: the democratization of database cluster management. Crate’s real claim to fame is that it allows developers – any developer – to easily set up a massively scalable data store on commodity hardware with sub-second query latency simply and within minutes.

Open source vision. Crate comes to market as an open source offering. Europe, after all, has been home to the open source movement in many forms, most notably through projects such as MySQL, Neo Technologies, Elasticsearch, Zend, and others. Linux itself has strong European roots. Crate hopes to join this list of European open source winners. In many ways, open source is the right way to do software. Increasingly, open source has gone from being an impediment to enterprise adoption to being a driver of enterprise adoption. A healthy open source community can help ensure the long-term viability of a software architecture, and can act to reduce risks for the enterprise. When code is open, it can be readily understood, tested, and extended to meet enterprise needs. I believe firmly that this is a great time to invest in enterprise software, that Europe and Israel are great places to build enterprise software companies, and that open source is going to be an increasingly important route to market going forward.

A roadmap that matters. At Crate, we draw some inspiration from Marc Benioff of Salesforce, who famously drew a line through the word software to help illustrate that SaaS meant you didn’t need to worry about buying and deploying software anymore. Similarly, Crate hopes to draw a line through the word database – making it insanely easy for developers and companies to deploy massive datastore clusters and use them in both applications and analytics, but without having to worry too much about how to set up and deploy the databases that underpin the cluster. That’s a big vision and it’s going to take some time to get there – but this is exactly the kind of real technology that makes venture capital in Europe a great place to be.

Visit Crate at www.crate.io, follow them on twitter at @cratedata and check them out at Github at https://github.com/crate.

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24th April 6:36 PM