2016 is off to a rockin’ start with the closing of our $20 million Series C funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from all of our existing investors including Accel Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Nexus Ventures.
At the same time, with the recent passing of David Bowie, I find myself drawn to my favorite Bowie tune, “Space Oddity.” In many ways, the lyrics to this song draw an interesting parallel to ScaleArc after this recent round.
“Take your protein pills and put your helmet on”
This round was the third I’ve helped raise at ScaleArc, and unexpectedly, it was our toughest in a lot of ways. Series A was easy for us – all we had to do was get people to believe in our idea before we had substantial customers to prove it. For this Series C round, I could already point to amazing brands relying on us for their most critical apps – companies including Dell, Nasdaq, Microsoft, Virgin America, and CBS.
So what made this round tough? There’s an overall tightening on money flow these days, especially for Series B and Series C companies. Given this environment, we’re all the more proud of raising $20 million with such an excellent partner as Bain – Bain’s experience with companies optimizing at the data tier will benefit our team a great deal.
So with our $20M worth of protein pills, our helmets are strapped on and we’re ready for liftoff. This funding has a lot of implications for our customers, our team, and the market at large.
- For our customers, the round brings even more confidence. These funds ensure our continued investment in R&D and accelerates our ability to add staff that improve the development and support of our technology.
- For our team, the funding increases our momentum. Our team is lean and has done tremendous work on limited resources. While we will still spend wisely, ScaleArc as a global organization can invest more in sales and marketing to accelerate our expansion to more customers around the world, while also expanding our world-class engineering team.
- For the market, the round signals an architectural shift. Our approach, building an abstraction layer for the data tier and providing innovative features like database load balancing and enhanced database security, has shown it’s the best way to enable zero downtime for mission-critical applications in database environments.
“And the stars look very different today”
With the fund raising behind us, I can get back to the incredibly rewarding work of leading our company and our amazing team. We’re fired up for a great 2016 and what lies ahead, even if we don’t know exactly what the future looks like. But we’re bringing our “A game” with a stronger and bigger team.
“And I think my spaceship knows which way to go”
Game on!