QuestDB, a member of the summer 2020 YCombinator cohort, is building an open-source time-series database with the full peace of mind. The startup today announced a seed round of $2.3 million.
Seedcamp, 7percent Ventures, YCombinator, Kima Ventures, and several unnamed angel investors led the round.
The software was first created in 2013 when the new CTO Vlad Ilyushchenko was designing trading systems for a financial services firm and was disappointed with the efficiency shortcomings of the databases available at the time, so he began creating software that could accommodate massive volumes of data and process it very rapidly.
QuestDB has been a side project for several years, a labor of love for Ilyushchenko until he met with his other co-founders Nicolas Hourcard, who became CEO and Tancrede Collard, who became CPO, and the three decided to build a startup on top of last year’s open-source project.
He says it’s about good performance as well. “We’ve launched a sample that you can download from our website that allows you to experiment a super-large dataset — basically 1.6 billion rows with sub-second queries, and it just shows how efficient the program is,” he said.
He sees open source as a way to build bottom-up adoption within organizations, first winning developers’ hearts and minds, then moving deeper into the company when they eventually build a managed version of the product in the cloud. For now, being open source also helps them to have a community of contributors as a small team to help build the database and add to its feature set.
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“We have this free-to-use open-source software, so it is quite essential for us to have such a division platform because we can essentially assist developers to resolve their issues, and we can ask for contributions from different groups. And that is a way of encouraging adoption, “Hourcard said.
He says partnering with YC has encouraged them to speak to other platform companies who have developed similar open-source startups and that’s great, but it’s also helped them learn to set and achieve targets and have access to some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, including Marc Andreessen, who gave a talk to the cohort on the same day we talked. “We definitely desire to have more diverse identities and ensure we continue to have a diverse workforce and we are very committed to that.”
Conclusion:
The organization needs to continue developing the ecosystem for the near term, trying to continue enhancing the open-source platform and at the same time focusing on the controlled cloud platform.
