From Handwiki ![]() | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software |
| Founded | 2015 |
| Founder | Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, Ben Darnell |
| Headquarters | New York City |
Key people | Spencer Kimball (CEO) Peter Mattis (VP of Engineering) Ben Darnell (CTO) Nate Stewart (Chief Product Officer) Lindsay Grenawalt (Chief People Officer) |
| Services | commercial database management systems |
| Website | www |
Cockroach Labs is a computer software company that develops commercial database management systems.[1] It is best known for CockroachDB, which has been compared to Google Spanner.[2] CockroachDB is a project that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver speedy access.[3][4] It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore.[5]
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by ex-Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. Prior to Cockroach Labs, Kimball and Mattis were key members of the Google File System team[6] while Darnell was a key member of the Google Reader team.[7] While at Google, all three had previously used Bigtable and were acquainted with its successor, Spanner.[2] After leaving Google, they wanted to design and build something similar for companies outside of Google. By June 2015, the company had nine CockroachDB engineers.[3]
Spencer Kimball wrote the first iteration of the design in January 2014, and began the open-source project on GitHub in February 2014, allowing outside access and contributions.[8] It attracted a community of experienced contributors, with the co-founders actively supporting the project with conferences, networking and meet-ups. Its collaborations on GitHub earned it Open Source Rookie of the Year, a title awarded by Black Duck Software to open-source projects.[9]
In June 2015, the company closed $6.25 million in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Google Ventures, and FirstMark Capital.[2] Benchmark's general partner Peter Fenton was named to the company's board of directors.[3] Additional investors included Hortonworks chief executive Rob Bearden, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi, and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher.[1]
In June 2019, Cockroach Labs announced that CockroachDB would change its license from the free software license Apache License 2.0 to a proprietary license.[10]
Cockroach Labs raised $55 million in a Series C round in August 2019, led by Altimeter Capital.[11]
Cockroach Labs is managed by CEO and Co-Founder Spencer Kimball. Other key executives are:[12]
The database is scalable, in that a single instance can scale from a single laptop to thousands of servers.[2]
CockroachDB is designed to run in the cloud and be resilient to failures.[13] The result is a database that is described as "almost impossible" to take down.[14][4] Even if multiple servers or an entire datacenter were to go offline, CockroachDB would keep services online.[15]
Categories: [Databases] [Distributed computing] [Software companies of the United States] [Companies (Computing)] [Companies]