Cockroach Labs


Cockroach Labs is a computer software company that develops commercial database management systems. It is best known for CockroachDB, which has been compared to Google Spanner. CockroachDB is a project that is designed to store copies of data in multiple locations in order to deliver speedy access. It is described as a scalable, consistently-replicated, transactional datastore.

History

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by ex-Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. Prior to Cockroach Labs, Kimball and Mattis were key members of the Google File System team while Darnell was a key member of the Google Reader team. While at Google, all three had previously used Bigtable and were acquainted with its successor, Spanner. After leaving Google, they wanted to design and build something similar for companies outside of Google. By June 2015, the company had nine CockroachDB engineers.
Spencer Kimball wrote the first iteration of the design in January 2014, and began the open-source project on GitHub in February 2014, allowing outside access and contributions. It attracted a community of experienced contributors, with the co-founders actively supporting the project with conferences, networking and meet-ups. Its collaborations on GitHub earned it Open Source Rookie of the Year, a title awarded by Black Duck Software to open-source projects.
In June 2015, the company closed $6.25 million in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Google Ventures, and FirstMark Capital. Benchmark's general partner Peter Fenton was named to the company's board of directors. Additional investors included Hortonworks chief executive Rob Bearden, CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi, and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Hammerbacher.
In June 2019, Cockroach Labs announced that CockroachDB would change its license from the free software license Apache License 2.0 to a proprietary license known as the Cockroach Community License.
Cockroach Labs raised $55 million in a Series C round in August 2019, led by Altimeter Capital.

Corporate affairs

Leadership

Cockroach Labs is managed by CEO and Co-Founder Spencer Kimball. Other key executives are:
The database is scalable, in that a single instance can scale from a single laptop to thousands of servers.
CockroachDB is designed to run in the cloud and be resilient to failures. The result is a database that is described as "almost impossible" to take down. Even if multiple servers or an entire datacenter were to go offline, CockroachDB would keep services online.