Brothers Toby and Jamie Morgan Hitchcock have spent years working together to build cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) systems, from tools that allow golf courses to measure “golfer engagement” to an online platform for rating job applicants. The systems they built vary widely in functionality, but one thing they all had in common was a reliance on a database that would allow them to scale while maintaining performance.
Managing databases isn't as hard as it used to be, but it's a different story when you scale them, and Hitchcock says he and Morgan experienced many common pain points firsthand while building a SaaS system.
“Developers spend a disproportionate amount of time managing infrastructure and ensuring that the data in their applications is consistent across multiple different databases and system types, each with different characteristics and guarantees,” Tobie told TechCrunch in an interview. “Additionally, developers must learn new programming and query languages while working with different client libraries, reducing application development time, slowing performance, and making application deployment more complex.”
The Hitchcock brothers' solution was a database architecture called SurrealDB, which is managed by a startup of the same name that Tobie and Jaime co-founded in 2015. (We covered SurrealDB's seed last January.) SurrealDB allows developers to model their data using several different data models at once and deploy the database across both cloud and on-premise environments.
“As a multi-model database, SurrealDB is useful for organizations that want to consolidate the number of databases they own and manage,” says Tobie. “We believe that a key part of each database is the ability to simply and easily control each aspect of the database.”
SurrealDB's online configuration dashboard. Image courtesy of SurrealDB
Built in the programming language Rust, the SurrealDB database architecture shares characteristics with relational databases, but offers additional features such as security controls and fine-grained access permission management.
SurrealDB also comes with Surrealist, a tool that allows developers to perform certain database administration tasks visually, without having to write code.
SurrealDB is not currently generating revenue, but plans to do so through Surreal Cloud, a fully managed version of SurrealDB that was released in beta earlier this month.
VCs are confident in the brothers' roadmap: SurrealDB closed a $20 million funding round this week led by FirstMark and Georgian, with participation from Crew Capital and Alumni Ventures, bringing the total raised by the 32-person London-based startup to $26 million.
Toby says profits will go towards product development and “sustainable” employment.
“SurrealDB has emerged as an option for organizations that are struggling with the costs of managing multiple databases,” Tobie adds optimistically, “and for organizations looking to reduce costs in their technology stack, we see this as an opportunity for SurrealDB.”