Seattle-based MotherDuck, which develops a serverless, easy-to-use data analytics platform powered by DuckDB, has secured $47.5 million in total funding. The $35 million Series A round led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (which backed Apex Space, Halliday and many others) follows a $12.5 million seed round led by Redpoint. Other investors participating in the round include Amplify Partners, Madrona and Altimeter.
$175M Valuation
With these investments, the company is now worth $175 million. MotherDuck will use the investment to build out its growing engineering and CTM teams and advance its collaboration with DuckSD Labs.
With this funding, MotherDuck is able to build out its world-class engineering team and increase go-to-market capabilities to provide a cloud analytics platform for companies looking to leverage DuckDB in an evolutionary way. At the same time, DuckDB enables it to continue as a tool for academic research.
“The truth is, ‘big data’ is dead; the simplicity and ease of understanding data is far more important than the size of the data,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO and co-founder of MotherDuck. ” “Laptops are faster than data warehouses these days. With advances in hardware, most workloads no longer require distributed computing. A cloud data provider’s focus on 100TB query performance is not only irrelevant to the vast majority of users, but also hurts the provider’s ability to provide a great user experience. We leverage the power of DuckDB and combine it with serverless analytics for easy scaling. “
“DuckDB is fortunate to have hundreds of contributors around the world. We look forward to the continued growth and adoption that our partnership with MotherDuck will bring.” Hannes Mühleisen, Co-Founder of DuckDB. “Thanks to the MotherDuck team, we can focus on innovating the core DuckDB platform ourselves and growing the open source community.”
Redpoint Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz and the MotherDuck team believed in the platform’s potential as something bigger than a just marketing vehicle. They saw a tremendous amount of talent being assembled for what would become a revolutionary platform. As they announced, they were happy to partner with the team to bring DuckDB to more people than ever before.
Serverless Data Analytics Platform
In 2022, Google engineer Jordan Tigani founded the company MotherDuck. He was previously the chief product officer at SingleStore, a database vendor, and an engineer for Google BigQuery. MotherDuck’s goal is to make data analytics awesome through building a serverless and easy-to-use data analysis platform based on DuckDB.
Dutch researchers Mark Raasveldt and Hannes Mühleisen created DuckDB as a lightweight analytics tool. It currently operates on the MotherDuck platform, which doesn’t require a server to run. Since its creation in 2019, it’s gained mainstream popularity among data analysts. This is because the platform can run anywhere, including in a browser— without requiring any configuration.
The DuckDB community will want to keep growing, and the MotherDuck platform will allow them to do so. The DuckDB open source platform has seen a 40% growth each month since its creation. Additionally, DuckDB has 400,000 downloads per month and 100,000 unique visitors to their site every month. This momentum is bound to continue with the addition of monetized features to MotherDuck.
The startup is preparing to release a public beta in March 2023. It’s still in a private preview at the moment.