Serverless database provider Xata raises $5 million in Index led round

Berlin’s serverless database provider Xata has clocked $5 million in the bank in a seed round led by Index Ventures. The startup offers anyone the power of a traditional database with the usability of a spreadsheet app, because let’s be honest, we’re still using spreadsheets because they’re the easiest and most familiar way of managing data. This new round of funding is expected to grow the engineering team and prepare for public release.

Founded by serial entrepreneur and former Director of Engineering at Elastic, Monica Sarbu, Xata is out to solve two major issues: the increasing demand from those with limited technical knowledge the ability to build apps and websites, (i.e. the no-code crowd), and experienced developers who’d rather develop and are simply tired of the tedium of configuring database servers, setting up replication, backups, caching, etc., etc., etc.

Via a single API, Xata has established its serverless database offer, allowing developers to store data that can be accessed everywhere, at any time, without the headaches of scaling a database. Aiming to be the next-step in the evolution of developers, Xata is positioning itself between the co-code crowd and the traditional developer, hoping to unleash an entirely new class of creators.

“User needs have evolved. Low-Code and No-Code enthusiasts expect to define the data model via a user-friendly web interface and they expect the data model to have high-level data types,” commented Sarbu. “That means, not only strings, numbers, booleans, but also images, multiple selects, checkboxes, email addresses, and so on. They also need the data to be as close as possible to their users, wherever they are in the World, so that it is always fast and reliable, similar to how the CDN is serving static files.”

In addition to Index Ventures, Xata’s $5 million seed funding was supported by Operator Collective, SV Angel, X-Factor, and Firstminute. The round also included participation from angel investors Shay Banon and Uri Boness from Elastic, Neha Narkhede from Confluent, Guillermo Rauch from Vercel, Elad Gil from Color Genomics, and Christian Bach and Mathias Biilmann from Netlify.