Open source SQL database Crate lands $4 million in seed funding round

Open source SQL database Crate has raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Dawn Capital with participation from Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes and existing investors DFJ Esprit, Speedinvest, and Sunstone Capital. Ari Helgason from Dawn Capital will join Crate’s board.

The Austrian startup was founded in 2013 and previously raised a $1.5 million seed round in 2014. It now has offices in Berlin and San Francisco. It is an open source SQL database that, according to the startup, is ideal for the Internet of Things, security, and the web.

“We’re using Crate in production, supporting the massive growth of our cloud-app security offering. Crate´s real-time SQL aggregations, its simple scalability and high availability make it a key element of our stack. Its distributed SQL engine allows simple adoption in any enterprise,” said Sekhar Sarukkai, co-founder of Skyhigh, one of Crate’s client.

“The next logical stride after Application Containers is Distributed Database Containers. The market is telling us that operational and analytics requirements are converging – people want to use one database for both needs,” said Crate CEO Christian Lutz. This and our Distributed SQL engine have spurred several massive deployments of Crate with enterprises”.

This $4 million investment will help the company’s “aggressive growth”, he said. Europe and the US remain Crate’s focus for the future, specifically in Silicon Valley. According to Lutz, it will hire additional pre-sales engineers, developer advocates, and add to its enterprise sales team.