VCs lay $52.5M golden egg for MotherDuck's serverless analytics platform

Database service company MotherDuck has secured $52.5 million in VC funding and removed the waiting list from its platform.

The Series B funding round led by Felicis Ventures gives MotherDuck, which has built a serverless data analytics platform based on the open source DuckDB, a nominal valuation of $400 million.

New and existing investors such as a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more participated in the round as well, giving the company $100 million in total funding.

MotherDuck also canceled the waiting list for developers and data scientists interested in trying the platform, which includes cloud storage, a SQL engine, database sharing, and a notebook UI for the DuckDB open source in-process analytical database.

In a prepared statement, Jordan Tigani, CEO and co-founder of MotherDuck, said: "Our initial funding allowed us to grow our engineering team to get our platform launched and in use by almost 2,000 analysts. With this funding and the momentum surrounding our platform and DuckDB’s adoption, the sky's the limit. The key is a simplified scale-up approach to SQL analytics; for the 95 percent of us who do not have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on an engine like DuckDB can be faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architectures."

MotherDuck also announced more product integrations with its platform, including Cube, dltHub, Evidence, GoodData, Kestra, Metabase, InfinyOn, LlamaIndex, Sling, Streamlit, and Voltron Data. Fivetran and Tableau are in the pipeline, Motherduck said.

• Ex-BigQuery exec and Motherduck CEO: For some users, the answer is to think small
• Great Graph Database Debate: Abandoning the relational model is 'reinventing the wheel'
• MotherDuck scores $47.5m to prove scale-up databases are not quackers
• DuckDB, database wrangler used by Google, Facebook, and Airbnb, hits 0.5.0

DuckDB runs in-process analytics on a laptop, in the browser, on a cloud VM, or a cloud function, for example. It can be used in Python notebooks, R scripts, JavaScript data apps, or Java backends.

MotherDuck provides a backend extension to DuckDB, allowing the database to work in a way that is analogous to Google Sheets, which partly runs on the client and partly on the server.

Although only just releasing its 0.8.0 iteration this week, DuckDB has already found a home at Google, Facebook, and Airbnb.

While working as chief product officer for SingleStore – the database which claims to support both analytical and transactional workloads on a single system – Tigani came across DuckDB, an open source project co-authored by Dutch computer science researchers Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt.

Speaking to The Register in March, Tigani recalled: "We started seeing DuckDB appearing on performance reports and giving us a run for the money. Not beating us, but it was still surprising. Then I started poking at it and I realised it could do some stuff that we couldn't do in SingleStore, that Snowflake couldn't do either, and that was pretty interesting." ®