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Announcing ArangoDB Series B Funding
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
This blog post is to announce ArangoDB’s Series B funding round and provide an update on the progress we have made so far. The company has achieved a lot in the past couple of years since we announced our Series A round of funding in 2019. We are excited for what lies ahead and can’t wait to bring you along for the journey!
ArangoDB came to life in 2015, when the company was founded by myself and Frank Celler. Prior to ArangoDB, we had been building databases for over 15 years. At the company Frank and I met, more than 20 years ago, he developed a database for stock quotes that was faster than Reuters’, as well as conceptualized and implemented a high-performance in-memory session database for Deutsche Post AG. Our background in building custom databases from scratch for many big enterprises in Europe led us to develop ArangoDB. Frank and I wanted to create something fresh and exciting within the database industry: to have a graph database is great, to have a graph database that supports other data models, in addition, is just awesome. This becomes even more clear as we see the huge benefits of this approach in the space of AI. You have more than simple structured data if you take a new challenge in this space.
Over the years, ArangoDB has continued to grow from one line of code to the company that we are today and I am extremely proud. Besides the huge improvements we added to ArangoDB, we released ArangoSearch, our natively-integrated full-text search and ranking engine for information retrieval in late 2018. We expanded into Machine Learning with the introduction of ArangoML. We also introduced ArangoDB Oasis, our fully-hosted, managed, and monitored database service available on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Today, I am very excited to announce that we have closed a $27.8 million Series B round led by Iris Capital. With this round of funding, we also welcome two new board members: Curt Gunsenheimer, Managing Partner at Iris Capital, and former CEO and co-founder of Instana, Mirko Novakic, of New Forge, who also participated in this round of funding (you can read the press release for more details). Let me welcome them once again. I am really happy to be working with them.
What does this mean moving forward? ArangoDB is focused on continuing to be the most scalable, open-source graph database and expand our reach within the market. According to research by Gartner, by 2025, graph technologies will be used in most data and analytical innovations. ArangoDB is focused on being at the forefront of graph analytics and continuing to expand our knowledge and technologies especially in GraphML and AI capabilities. If you want to learn more about ArangoDB I encourage you to check out ArangoDB Dev Days, our first-ever developer conference taking place October 18th-22nd. It is completely virtual and 100% free.
As ArangoDB expands, so does our team. Today I am also excited to welcome Frank Swain as our new Chief Revenue Office, as well as Dr. Jörg Schad as our new Chief Technical Officer.
Frank Swain joins us most recently from Instana but also has held sales leadership positions at AppDynamics and Splunk. He brings to ArangoDB a wealth of knowledge around how to best go-to-market and continue to grow, and I very much look forward to his contributions.
Jörg is a frequent speaker at conferences and our own webinars and workshops. Jörg joined ArangoDB two years ago as our Head of Engineering and Machine Learning and has greatly helped guide our product and development strategy as we continue to expand our graph analytic and AI capabilities. He will continue to oversee our product development efforts, and I’m pleased to be able to officially welcome him to the ArangoDB executive team.
Before I wrap up this post, I want to take a minute to thank the entire ArangoDB Grove for all the hard work and dedication throughout the years that have made this announcement possible. I would also like to thank our community and users for standing by us and for showing us so much love and support over the years (as noted by the nearly 12,000 stargazers on GitHub! BTW visit us on GitHub and let it be 12,000 today).
And last, but certainly not least, I want to mention that our avocado grove is growing. We are currently hiring throughout all of our departments, and most roles are fully remote. Check out our career page to see what we have open – we’d love for you to join us for this next chapter of ArangoDB.
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