Last week Runa Capital, a venture firm operating globally from its offices in Moscow and San Francisco, announced a €3 million investment in MariaDB Corporation, a global software vendor specializing in high availability, high performance and highly scalable open source database solutions.
Headquartered in Espoo, Finland, MariaDB (also known as SkySQL) aims to become “the world’s premier open source database platform.”
According to the company, “much progress has already been made as the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, which used to dominate in the web development, is now turning into LEMP (where “E” stands for Nginx and “M” for MariaDB) as MySQL is being replaced with MariaDB in key Linux distributions and Nginx web-server is rapidly gaining market share among the top web sites.”
Last year, MariaDB received $20 million from Intel Capital and other European and US investors.
“There was some room reserved for a value-adding strategic investor,” Runa Capital PR Director Liliana Pertenava told East-West Digital news.
“MariaDB will largely benefit from Runa’s connections with Parallels and portfolio companies NGINX and Jelastic, by further expanding the achieving adoption of MariaDB in crucial enterprise architectures,” she explained.
Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, MariaDB and MySQL creator, has long history with the Runa team and an advisor to Jelastic, Pertenava added.
“Despite all the hype about BigData and NoSQL, classical Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) are here to stay. The global RDBMS market, which amounts to some $26 billion, is growing by 10% yearly over the period 2012-2016,” Pertenava noted.
