MotherDuck is fueling up to flap its wings a little harder.
The analytics company on Wednesday announced a $52.5 million round, bringing total funding to date to $100 million. The Series B round pushes its post-money valuation to $400 million.
The fresh cash follows a $35 million Series A round led by Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and a $12 million seed round led by Redpoint Ventures that MotherDuck revealed last year.
Founded last year and led by former Google engineer Jordan Tigani, MotherDuck bills itself as a “collaborative serverless analytics platform.” It is built on the open-source platform DuckDB, an in-process online analytical processing database, or OLAP.
The idea is to make it more simple for businesses to run analytics on their data, versus relying on more expensive services from large cloud vendors. The startup sells to existing DuckDB users, data analysts and software developers.
“The key is a simplified scale-up approach to SQL analytics; for the 95% of us who do not have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on an engine like DuckDB can be faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architecture,” Tigani said in a statement.
DuckDB was co-created in 2019 by researchers Hannes Mühleisen and Mark Raasveldt at the CWI in the Netherlands. Since launching, it has gained widespread adoption from data analysts for its ability to run anywhere, including a user’s browser.
MotherDuck, a monetized version of the platform, will go beyond the capabilities of DuckDB, letting users run analytical queries spread across multiple channels.
“We believe that basing our service on DuckDB can make analytics faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architectures,” Ryan Boyd, a MotherDuck co-founder, wrote in a blog post Wednesday.
The startup released an invitation-only version of their product in June and removed its waitlist on Wednesday. The company said it has more than 2,000 users.
Tigani previously worked as the chief product officer at database vendor SingleStore. Before that, he was a founding engineer at Google’s BigQuery.
“Even working on BigQuery, people were not doing big queries,” Tigani said during an episode of Madrona’s podcast in April. “For the most part, they were doing little queries and focusing on getting data in and getting data out, and the user experience of the query and using the system is actually more important than size.”
Tigani is joined by Boyd, a longtime developer relations leader who has worked for Google and others, and Tino Tereshko, who was a vice president of product at Firebolt. Leila Horejsi, a former vice president of account management at Fast, left the company in March and is fractional vice president of customer experience at Productiv.
The company has 30 employees and plans to increase to 45 people by the end of the year.
MotherDuck was nominated as a finalist for Deal of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards.
The round was led by Felicis, with participation from new and existing investors a16z, Madrona Venture Group, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more. Viviana Faga, general partner at Felicis, will join MotherDuck’s board of directors.
