Open-source NoSQL database startup ScyllaDB raises $16M Series B from Samsung, Qualcomm Ventures, Western Digital, Magma Ventures, others
Bérénice Magistretti / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 round is the early chapter of a funding arc that kept compounding: ScyllaDB went on to a $25M Series C extension in 2019 and then a $43M round led by Eight Roads Ventures in 2023, taking total funding to $103M. What makes the Series B notable is the investor mix — Samsung, Qualcomm Ventures, and Western Digital are all hardware-side strategics backing a database software company.
The round also landed just before an open-source database funding wave that the corpus documents clearly: Yugabyte raised a $48M Series C led by Lightspeed in 2021 and then a $188M Series C at a $1.3B valuation months later, while ArangoDB pulled in a $27.8M Series B the same year.
First-order effects
- ScyllaDB gains capital and three strategic backers whose businesses — semiconductors, mobile silicon, and storage — sit directly upstream of the high-throughput, low-latency workloads its NoSQL database targets.
Second-order effects
- Western Digital's participation ties database software demand to flash storage consumption, giving a storage vendor a stake in workloads that burn through drives; rivals like MongoDB face a funded open-source challenger courting the same latency-sensitive deployments.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, infrastructure startups increasingly fund themselves off strategic hardware money rather than purely financial capital, and open-source databases become a standard enterprise procurement category — a shift the later Cyral raise for cross-platform governance over stores like MongoDB implicitly confirms.
The trend: Open-source database startups are drawing progressively larger rounds and strategic hardware investors as enterprises re-platform latency-sensitive workloads onto them.