MariaDB Corp raises $9m new funding, adds Monty Widenius as CTO
Open-source relational database software startup MariaDB Corporation has secured a new $9m injection in equity financing, which it will use to accelerate sales and technology development.
MariaDB CTO Monty Widenius
This investment brings the total raised by the Finnish company, which has nine million users, to $40m. The company said Intel Capital and California Technology Ventures are among the investors in the funding round.
The company, which builds enterprise products on top of the open-source MariaDB database, also said it has appointed Michael Howard as its new CEO and Monty Widenius as CTO.
Most recently Howard was CEO at predictive-analytics company C9, which was acquired by InsideSales.
Widenius is the main creator of MySQL and MariaDB, and will remain an open-source advocate at the MariaDB Foundation, a non-profit organisation that aims to encourage continuity and open collaboration in the MariaDB ecosystem.
"MariaDB's success as an open-source technology goes hand in hand with its growing popularity in the commercial market. As part of the MariaDB team, I will be able to create innovative data management capabilities more quickly, and ensure these are open and accessible to the global development community by continuing the close collaboration with the MariaDB Foundation," he said.
MariaDB is the community-developed branch of Oracle's open-source MySQL database. MySQL was acquired for $1bn by Sun Microsystems, which in turn was bought by Oracle for $7.4bn in 2010.
By then, some of the database's original creators had already left to create MariaDB. In October 2014, commercial MariaDB company SkySQL changed its name to MariaDB Corporation.