PlanetScale, a serverless database powered by Vitess and MySQL, raises a $50M Series C led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing its total raised to $105M
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
PlanetScale has moved fast since it emerged from stealth in late 2018 on top of Vitess, the MySQL-scaling technology that grew out of YouTube: a $3M seed was followed just five months ago by a $30M Series B, and today's $50M Series C brings total funding to $105M. The round is led by Kleiner Perkins, which is deploying from freshly raised funds after adding over $2B across two new vehicles and more recently a $3.5B raise aimed partly at early- and growth-stage bets.
First-order effects
- PlanetScale gains roughly doubled capital to push its serverless Vitess-and-MySQL database-as-a-service beyond the traction that justified a Series B only months ago.
- Kleiner Perkins adds another infrastructure lead to a portfolio where it has recently led rounds such as Hippocratic AI's Series B and PermitFlow's $31M Series A.
Second-order effects
- Rival cloud-native database vendors like Timescale, which raised successive rounds on ease of cloud deployment, now compete against a better-capitalized player selling scale without infrastructure management.
- The compressed B-to-C cadence pressures other database startups to raise faster or differentiate, since investors are clearly willing to fund this category at Series C pace.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, database infrastructure consolidates around managed services built on battle-tested open-source cores, with a small set of mega-funded venture firms — Kleiner Perkins among them — acting as gatekeepers for which platforms get scaled.
The trend: Database-as-a-service is consolidating around managed platforms built on proven open-source engines, funded at an accelerating clip by a shrinking set of mega-fund venture firms.