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Anyone who has followed fortunes MySQL and Maria D.B These past 15 years you probably remember SkySQL, another brand that existed in the same database ecosystem, and a year ago it became… Independent company once again.
This company announced today that it has raised its first external funding — a $6.6 million seed round — with ambitions to use it to bring conversational AI to databases.
MySQL, for the uninitiated, is a popular relational database management system (RDMS) created by MichaelMonty“And Adenius, David ExmarkAnd Alan Larson in the mid-1990s. After the business behind the project was sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008, Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems itself for $7 billion, a deal that prompted Widenius to break up MySQL and create MariaDB to ensure it remained an independent company. And community based. Driven effort.
Widenius then created two organizations: SkySQL, a business entity that sells services for MySQL; And Monty, which was all about supporting MariaDB.
These two companies merged in 2013, with the combined group Rebranding Like MariaDB, it raised about $230 million in funding. Maria D.B He was resurrected SkySQL brand in 2020 via a new cloud database product, but after struggling with life as a public company (read more about that saga here), MariaDB Weave SkySQL As an independent company last year, led by the team that was developing the product at MariaDB.
While MariaDB retained an equity stake in the spin-off, the onus was largely on itself SkySQL To forge her own path. That’s why the startup today announced an infusion of new funds, as it looks to bring AI into the database mix.
The startup’s $6.6 million seed funding includes participation from well-known seed-stage investors ENIAC VenturesWhich has previously invested in companies such as Airbnb and Reddit, in addition to… Good capital and West Texas Intermediate crude oil.
Artificial intelligence agent
Businesses typically use SkySQL to alleviate the hassle and complexity of running MariaDB – a fully managed cloud product that automates provisioning and scaling, with features that handle security, compliance, and disaster recovery. Since exiting MariaDB last year, SkySQL Added Microsoft Azure supportWhich means it is now truly multi-cloud as it already supports deployments across AWS and Google Cloud Platform.
However, the company is now looking to align itself with the burgeoning AI revolution, addressing one of the biggest problems it says exist with databases today — that they are not optimized for AI.
As such, SkySQL now offers a duo of AI products, including what it calls “semantic agents” that provide insights into operational data. Therefore, SkySQL customers can build their own AI agents and effectively embed them in their applications, allowing their users to ask natural language questions about their data stored in SkySQL – something that can be a challenge in enterprise settings due to security and compliance issues related to moving sensitive data around, Not to mention the old issues about so-called “hallucinations”.
SkySQL keeps everything within the platform, while semi-autonomous agents also support human input in the loop to help optimize and improve the output over time.
Elsewhere, SkySQL is also launching SkyCopilot, essentially an AI assistant that can help DBAs improve their database performance, troubleshoot problems, and “manage routine tasks” all through natural language queries. This could be something like “Please give me a report summarizing the health of my server“or”Identify slow-performing database queries“.
So, in fact, SkySQL is positioning itself as more than just a database company, it’s all about unifying various integrated AI components, such as vector databases and large language models (LLMs), into a single API that allows users to extract natural language answers without The need to transfer their data.
Founding team
SkySQL’s founding team includes the CEO Nithin Rao (pictured above), who co-founded a vehicle connectivity platform called Autonomic which he sold to Ford in 2021. He then launched an AI analytics startup called Definitive Intelligence, which was acquired by AI chip company Groq last March, though Rao had already left for SkySQL by that point.
“SkySQL represents a natural next step — an opportunity to realize the vision of being the operational data platform for modern applications, especially those that leverage generative AI,” Rao told TechCrunch.
Rao’s co-founders are CTO Jags Ramnarayan And CPO Saravana Krishnamurthyand they both moved from MariaDB, where they were already familiar with SkySQL. Although Rao only joined them with the advent of MariaDB’s SkySQL, he already knew one of the founders from a previous cloud computing company they had worked at a few years earlier.
“Jags and I first met while working together at Pivotal, and when the opportunity arose to develop SkySQL, we reconnected,” Rao said. “The opportunity to join such a strong team and build something transformative in this field was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
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