Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group is leading a $27 million investment in Fauna, a company founded by two former Twitter engineers that is positioning itself as a leader in databases for a new generation of applications.
Eric Berg, a former Okta and Apptio executive, is taking the helm of Fauna as CEO, succeeding co-founder Evan Weaver, who is becoming CTO. Bob Muglia, the former Microsoft executive, who was most recently CEO of cloud data warehouse company Snowflake, is joining the 40-person company as executive chairman.
Fauna is betting on the rise of serverless computing, in which applications connect to key services using APIs rather than requiring developers to manually build backend infrastructure.
The company is based in San Francisco but has been operating completely remotely since it was founded in 2011 by Weaver, the former Twitter director of infrastructure; and Matt Freels, the former technical lead on Twitter’s database team, who is now Fauna’s chief architect.
With the latest investment, Fauna has raised a total of $57 million. Also participating in the new round were Addition Capital and GV, formerly known as Google Ventures, along with GitHub founder Tom Preston Werner, database pioneer Roger Bamford, angel investor Robin Vasan, new institutional investors Cohort Ventures and AVG, existing investors CRV and others.
Madrona’s involvement resulted from a longstanding connection between Muglia and S. “Soma” Somasegar, the Madrona managing director, who is joining the Fauna board with the investment. The two worked together for many years at Microsoft, where Somasegar was a longtime executive, most recently leading the company’s developer division.
In an interview this week, Somasegar said he views the company’s flagship FaunaDB as unique in its approach, providing a cloud-native database that can be accessed on-demand by an emerging generation of serverless applications that are powered by managed services rather than their own dedicated servers. The approach removes the complexities that developers face in setting up, configuring and operating a database.
Somasegar acknowledged the popularity of existing database technologies such as MongoDB, CockroachDB, Microsoft’s Cosmos DB and Amazon’s DynamoDB, but said “there is no other product that exists in the world” that is taking the same approach as FaunaDB.
“Developers are moving en masse to serverless architectures for new applications, marking the dawn of serverless as the next tool chain for building global, hyperscale apps,” Somasegar wrote in a blog post. “FaunaDB plugs in seamlessly into this new ecosystem and uniquely extends the serverless experience all the way to the database.”
Somasegar said Fauna has also been savvy in its approach of appealing first to developers as a way of ultimately winning broader adoption and acceptance inside companies, similar to how MongoDB gained traction.
“The database market is massive and there are always opportunities for new platforms to emerge and differentiate. However, this has proven difficult as it is expensive to build a new database and even more expensive to sell one,” he wrote. “Nowadays, decisions around infrastructure are more and more driven by developers and so any new platform needs to win the hearts and minds of developers first and foremost. Without this, the only way to land new customers is going to be through a deep technical sales process.”
Berg, the new Fauna CEO, was most recently Okta’s chief product officer, helping to build the identity and access management company for more than eight years, through its 2017 IPO. Before that, he was vice president of product management and marketing at Apptio, the Bellevue, Wash.-based company that makes technology for tracking IT and cloud services spending. He also worked previously at Microsoft and Intel.
He described Fauna’s view of the evolution of application architecture: moving from mainframe computers, to client-server applications, to present-day “three-tier” applications that use a database, app server and web server. Fauna is targeting a fourth generation in this evolution, a “client-serverless” application model.
Fauna describes itself as multi-cloud, currently running on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Berg said the company plans to make its database available on Microsoft Azure, as well.
