TileDB closes $34M Series B to advance the vision of the ‘modern database’ as an alternative to the ‘modern data stack’

TileDB envisions evolving the ‘database’ by integrating multiple data modalities, runnable code and versatile compute in a single product

Cambridge MA, October 10, 2023: TileDB Inc. today announced the closing of its Series B funding round, raising $34 million to advance its vision of the “modern database” as a single secure product for enterprises, developers and scientists. The funding was led by AlleyCorp, founded by Kevin Ryan (co-creator of MongoDB, among many other accomplishments), with participation from Two Bear Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Big Pi Ventures, Intel Capital, Uncorrelated, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Amgen Ventures, NTT Docomo Ventures, Verizon Ventures, S Ventures, LDV Partners and Scale Asia Ventures. Joining TileDB’s Board of Directors are Jorge Colindres (Partner at AlleyCorp) and Jeff Miller (ex-CRO at Cockroach Labs, who brings more than two decades of experience in leading and growing successful sales teams).

“To cope with the increased complexity of their data and compute needs, organizations are resorting to building a ‘modern data stack,’ which is often a set of convoluted data, code and compute tools. This approach is extremely costly, hard to implement correctly, and cumbersome to maintain, due to the disparate tools and data engineering involved,” said Dr. Stavros Papadopoulos, founder and CEO, TileDB. “Think of TileDB as the modern data stack in a box.”

TileDB Inc. envisions building the next evolution of the 'database', consolidating multiple data modalities, reproducible runnable code, and versatile compute, all in one product.

TileDB is multi-modal because it adopts the multi-dimensional array as its first-class data structure, which has the ability to morph and efficiently capture any diverse data (tables, genomics, images, graphs, key-values, point clouds and many more). TileDB also allows users to build, maintain and run any sophisticated ETL process, pipeline, workload or query algorithm, inside its serverless distributed computing environment. Keeping data, code and compute in a single place eliminates silos and increases productivity and collaboration across teams and individuals.

TileDB enables its customers to significantly reduce their costs (eliminating unnecessary software licenses, lowering cloud consumption and saving on data engineering time), and enjoy faster time-to-insight via its strong performance and easy governance features. TileDB is seeing traction with Fortune 500 customers, top pharmaceuticals, hospitals, defense and government organizations. The company has proven its strong offering in Life Sciences (single-cell biology, population genomics and bioimaging), Geospatial (point clouds, rasters and geometric object management), and traditional tabular analytics.

And what about Generative AI? Dr. Papadopoulos asserts that, “This is just a combination of yet another data modality (vector embeddings, which are literally 1D arrays natively handled by TileDB), code (the ML models producing the embeddings, along with the LLM itself), and compute (securely running the LLM on private vector data for the enterprise). A superb use case for the modern database.” TileDB’s recently announced support for vector search and Generative AI in fact proves that TileDB and the vision of a modern database are viable, valuable and future-proof — a safe bet for organizations that need to embrace new data technologies without constantly reinventing their infrastructure.

“TileDB isn't just another database; it's an intelligent and useful approach to addressing the challenges related to working with multiple modalities of data, which we see as a quickly emerging problem across a variety of industries and businesses. We’re extremely impressed with Stavros's vision for TileDB, as well as the team he's assembled to execute that vision.” — Jorge Colindres, Partner at AlleyCorp.

“TileDB is upping the standards for simplicity and performance. We're excited to be part of this journey and believe that now is the pivotal moment for TileDB to redefine the data landscape.” — Kevin Ryan, Founder and CEO at AlleyCorp.

Get started with TileDB

TileDB provides a rich ecosystem of open-source tools for modern data management, available on GitHub. The commercial product, TileDB Cloud, is a secure platform for multi-modal data management and discovery, serverless distributed computing, interactive analysis and collaboration. Sign up for TileDB Cloud or dive into a growing library of tutorials on the TileDB Blog.