TileDB Secures Investment From Verizon Ventures

Cambridge, MA, May 17, 2022: TileDB, Inc., a pioneering database company, announced today that it has received a strategic investment from Verizon Ventures, joining recent investments from Lockheed Martin Ventures, AMGEN Ventures and NTT Docomo Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of advanced features of the TileDB universal database and to scale go-to-market functions.

The advent of 5G and IoT will transform every industry with an explosion of new services tapping a variety of data sources. These complex data types include point cloud, imaging, video, location data, weather, time-series and more. Managing such data as enormous collections of files in object stores, data lakes managed by purpose-built solutions, or force-fitting such data in traditional warehouses has led to unnecessary hassles and costs for end-users, slowing down analytics and Science.

"At TileDB, we set out to debunk the myth around performance optimization in purpose-built data solutions," said Stavros Papadopoulos, TileDB Founder and CEO. “Data management concepts are common to all domains, yet the market is flooded with special-purpose products that excel only under the most ideal conditions. In the last two years, we proved that it is possible to achieve both universality and price-performance superiority over purpose-built solutions.”

TileDB offers a universal database that uses multi-dimensional arrays to model and store any type of data on any backend (in the cloud or on-prem) and analyze it with any programming language and tool. Arrays are the most common data structure for any type of data science or advanced analytics. Standardizing on a single logical way to work with multiple forms of data allows TileDB to offer tailored performance, elastic scalability and extreme interoperability. TileDB consists of TileDB Embedded, an open-source storage engine for arrays, and TileDB Cloud, a universal database that offers secure governance, and serverless distributed compute, along with data, code & model sharing for highly performant analysis and ease of collaboration.

“With the growing volume and importance of data, teams need top-notch databases and data management platforms. At the same time, data storage isn’t cloud-optimized nor does it support much-needed data updates. TileDB’s platform helps solve these needs,” said Kristina Serafim, Managing Director at Verizon Ventures. “Verizon Ventures is excited to support TileDB as they continue to build out their universal database that easily supports any type of data source, from dense to sparse multi-dimensional arrays, all while enabling the performance of 5G and mobile edge compute applications.”

The company is gaining traction across a variety of verticals by first tackling the most challenging data domains and then working with IT leaders to consolidate their organizations’ data infrastructure to a single solution across enterprise data management and data science workloads.

“TileDB Cloud is a highly cost effective solution for genome analysis at population scale. Multi-dimensional arrays are ideal for complex, dynamic queries of very large genome sets,” said Dr. Stephen Kingsmore, CEO at Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine.

Ambrose Carr, Group Product Lead at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “TileDB's performant, scalable and cloud-native solution is ideal for our efforts at CZI to assemble and distribute one of the largest repositories of single-cell biological data in the world.”

David Henderson, Director of Biostatistics at NanoString Technologies, stated: “We needed a solution that enabled data and artifact cataloging, access control across the enterprise application, and fast data access for both storage and compute. TileDB has been able to deliver on all of these requirements for our cloud based application in a single provider solution that would have otherwise only been possible with multiple vendors, greatly increasing the complexity of our project.”

About TileDB

TileDB transforms the lives of analytics professionals and data scientists with a universal database so they can access, analyze, and share complex data sets with any tool at global scale. TileDB overcomes the constraints of columnar tables, flat files, and SQL-only tools, handling all data with a multi-dimensional array engine and extreme interoperability across the data science ecosystem. With its totally serverless infrastructure, TileDB delivers access control and enables distributed computing at global scale, eliminating all cluster management and minimizing TCO. TileDB, Inc. was spun out of MIT and Intel Labs in May 2017 and is backed by Two Bear Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Uncorrelated Ventures, Intel Capital and Big Pi.