MariaDB, a well-known open source database company, announced on Nov. 2 that it had completed a $27 million series C funding round led by Alibaba. With the funding completed, the MariaDB community will be in a stronger position to participate in the growing competition for databases.
MariaDB is a globally renowned open source database, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, with 12 million users worldwide, including Booking.com, HP, Virgin Mobile, Wikipedia, etc., providing hybrid, public and private cloud deployment.
“MariaDB’s funding round is based on our comprehensive set of data-based application capabilities for the next generation of applications,” said Michael Wideneus, founder of MariaDB. At the same time, this round of funding will enable MariaDB to grow rapidly in the future, following the release of a new generation of ai-based solutions for the cloud and automation.”
With the development of cloud services, the database market has undergone unprecedented changes. According to DB-Engines, open source databases are gaining momentum over commercial ones in the top 10. MariaDB makes the TOP10 for relational databases.
Gartner research reports that 70 percent of new applications will be developed in open source databases, and 50 percent of existing commercial databases will be open source by 2018. As of the first half of this year, 45 percent of databases were open source, up from 35 percent four years ago.
It is also the latest development in Chinese tech companies’ active participation in global technology competition.
“In the open source community, we believe this collaboration will promote the development of MariaDB’s data infrastructure and Ali Cloud platform, and we have the opportunity to jointly create innovative solutions for public and private cloud deployment,” said Jin Li, vice president of Ali Cloud.
Alibaba Group is an active supporter of major databases and actively embraces the open source community. It has contributed nearly 300 patches to the MySQL community. In 2015, AliYun joined WebScaleSQL, an open source MySQL organization initiated by MySQL teams from Facebook, Google, Twitter and Linkedin. In 2016, Aliyun database expert Peng Lixun became the first Chinese engineer to join the MariaDB Foundation. Alibaba is currently ranked 9th in the world by Gitstar Ranking.