Data is involved in pretty much everything we do in today’s digital age. Whether it’s a record of our shopping trends or tabs on where we’re traveling, organizations gather and analyze huge amounts of the data we create to better understand and predict our needs. However, this concept of big data is changing as modern hardware advances, according to data analytics platform MotherDuck.
“The fact is, ‘big data’ is dead; the simplicity and the ease of making sense of your data is a lot more important than its size,” MotherDuck’s co-founder and CEO Jordan Tigani said in a statement. “Laptops today are faster than a data warehouse. With advances in hardware, distributed computation is no longer necessary for most workloads.”
MotherDuck, which operates a serverless solution based on open-source database DuckDB, announced Tuesday it raised $47.5 million in funding. The raise consists of a $35 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $12.5 million seed round from lead investor Redpoint. MotherDuck will use the capital to fuel growth amid the increasing adoption of DuckDB.
MotherDuck’s founding team includes veterans in the data space who have worked at companies like Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon Web Services and Meta. Prior to MotherDuck, the co-founders realized that most workloads these days aren’t dependent on hoards of data stored in warehouses. This led them on a mission to combine the smoothness and speed of in-process database DuckDB with the collaboration and scalability of the cloud.
“We are taking the power of DuckDB and combining it with serverless analytics to help scale up and scale down with ease,” Tigani said in a statement.
The open-source database for analytics workloads has grown significantly in demand, according to MotherDuck. In fact, DuckDB’s score on DB-Engines, a list ranking database management systems by popularity, has increased by 40 percent every month.
“DuckDB has been fortunate to have hundreds of contributors around the world. We look forward to the continued growth and adoption that partnering with MotherDuck will bring,” Hannes Mühleisen, co-creator of DuckDB, said in a statement. “Thanks to the MotherDuck team, we are able to focus our efforts on independent innovation of the DuckDB core platform and growth of the open source community.”
With its new capital, MotherDuck will focus on growing its engineering team and building out its go-to-market team. The company is also committed to deepening its partnership with DuckDB Labs and helping more organizations use DuckDB in a streamlined way.
