TileDB Closes $15M Series A for Industry’s First Universal Data Engine

Cambridge, MA, July 14, 2020: TileDB, Inc. has secured a $15M Series A investment round led by Two Bear Capital, joined by Uncorrelated Ventures and all existing investors: Nexus Venture Partners, Intel Capital, and Big Pi Ventures. The funding will help the company expand go-to-market and product development for its “universal data engine,” a novel database that goes beyond tables to manage any complex data and beyond SQL to analyze the data with any tool, all serverless and at planet scale. Montana philanthropist and Two Bear Capital Managing Partner Mike Goguen will join TileDB’s Board of Directors.

The Series A financing comes after TileDB was chosen by customers who experienced two key pains: scalability for complex data and deployment. Whole-genome population data, single-cell gene data, spatio-temporal satellite imagery, and asset-trading data all share multi-dimensional structures that are poorly handled by monolithic databases, tables, and legacy file formats. Newer computational frameworks evolved to offer “pluggable storage” but that forces another part of the stack to deal with data management. As a result, organizations waste resources on managing a sea of files and optimizing storage performance, tasks traditionally done by the database. Moreover, developers and data scientists are spending excessive time in data engineering and deployment, instead of actual analysis and collaboration.

“We flipped the data management model,” said Dr. Stavros Papadopoulos, CEO and original creator of TileDB. “We invented a database that focuses on universal storage and data management rather than the compute layer, which we’ve instead made `pluggable.` We cleared the path for analytics professionals and data scientists by taking over the messiest parts of data management, such as optimized storage for all data types on numerous backends, data versioning, metadata, access control within or outside organizational boundaries, and logging. On top, we developed numerous APIs for fast direct data access and efficient integrations with a growing set of popular tools such as Spark, Dask, MariaDB and PrestoDB. Finally, we built a serverless infrastructure for easy, secure cross-organizational sharing and scalable compute, called TileDB Cloud.”

According to Scott Soenen, VP of Product Engineering at Capella Space: “The partnership with TileDB gelled perfectly with our desire to deliver a new level of innovation in open data programs aimed at the geospatial community. Open data alone isn’t enough. It’s also about easy access to compute resources and versatility of analytics. TileDB Cloud removes multiple manual steps in data access for the geospatial developer community and offers intuitive self-service and interactive analytics."

“We have chosen TileDB as the storage engine to power our cellxgene project at CZI, which is an interactive data explorer for single-cell transcriptomics datasets,” said Bruce Martin, Director of Engineering, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. “TileDB provides an easy and powerful way to manage our huge array data on various backends, including cloud object stores. The serverless infrastructure of TileDB Cloud opens the door to extreme scale with very low engineering efforts on our part, allowing us to focus more on scientific discoveries instead.”

Magnus Isaksson, Director of Bioinformatics, Helix shared, “The synergy between our two companies has enabled us to take an innovative approach to storing and analyzing genomic data at population-scale. We were excited to find TileDB after extensive diligence of potential solutions that could meet Helix's needs and advance our vision to revolutionize population health via the power of genomics."

“Many of the world’s most urgent problems - from COVID to climate change - require the analysis of large volumes of data in order to find solutions. TileDB’s technology addresses the infrastructure deficit that adds friction, delay, and cost to generating the key insights and discoveries needed from this data,” said Mike Goguen, Managing Partner at Two Bear Capital and lead investor. “We are excited to partner with Stavros and TileDB to build an enduring company delivering massive value for the developers and enterprise customers working to solve these and other critically important problems.”

To learn more about TileDB visit our website, check out the open-source TileDB Embedded storage engine on Github or sign up on TileDB Cloud.

About Two Bear Capital

Two Bear Capital (TBC) was founded and is led by venture capitalist and Montana philanthropist Michael Goguen. With professionals in Whitefish, MT, the San Francisco Bay area and San Diego, CA, TBC invests in early stage companies with disruptive innovations at the intersections of biotech, bioinformatics, machine learning / AI and cybersecurity that could deliver dramatically better solutions to the most critical problems affecting human health, security and wellness. To learn more, visit www.twobearcapital.com and follow TBC on LinkedIn.

About Uncorrelated Ventures

Uncorrelated Ventures was founded by Salil Deshpande in 2020 with Bain’s backing to focus on open source and infrastructure software, both traditional and decentralized. Over 14 years as general partner and managing director at Bay Partners and Bain Capital, Salil invested $350M+ into 50+ companies early, including MuleSoft, DynaTrace, Buddy Media, SpringSource, Redis Labs, SysDig, Jambool, Dropcam, Tealium, Sonatype, Frame, DataStax, Netdata, Quantum Metric, Philz Coffee, Upgrade and DeFi projects Compound and Maker. Salil was on the Forbes Midas List of the 100 best-performing venture investors worldwide in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

About Nexus Venture Partners

Nexus Venture Partners is a leading early-stage venture capital firm partnering with extraordinary entrepreneurs building product-first companies. With $1.5B under management, Nexus operates as one team across the US and India. The Nexus family includes Aryaka, Biz2Credit, Cloud.com, Clover Health, Delhivery, Druva, Gluster, H2O.ai, Hasura, Headspin, Kaltura, Mezi, Observe.ai, OLX, Paysense, Postman, Pubmatic, Rancher, Snapdeal, Unacademy, Whitehatjr, and Zomato. For more information, visit www.nexusvp.com.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital invests in innovative startups targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, datacenter and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute, and a wide range of other disruptive technologies. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested US$12.9 billion in more than 1,582 companies worldwide, and 692 portfolio companies have gone public or participated in a merger. Intel Capital curates thousands of business development introductions each year between its portfolio companies and the Global 2000. For more information on what makes Intel Capital one of the world’s most powerful venture capital firms, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.

About Big Pi Ventures

Big Pi Ventures is a seed-stage fund investing in innovative technology companies connected to Greece and engaged primarily in enterprise/B2B software, materials and life sciences. Big Pi is managed by seasoned investment professionals and successful entrepreneurs that assist companies in attracting highly technical and loyal human capital. Find out more about our fund, portfolio, and career opportunities by visiting www.bigpi.vc.