Today Couchbase has taken another significant step toward our goal of becoming the next great enterprise software company. I’m excited to share with you that we have secured a $105M all-equity funding round led by GPI Capital with oversubscribed participation from our existing investors including Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Adams Street Partners, and Mayfield. We celebrate this milestone with our employees, investors, partners, and our 500+ customers who rely on Couchbase for their most business-critical applications.

In the context of applications, Couchbase is a clear beacon in a crowded sea. 

Applications are the interface between humans and the digital world, and every interaction between ourselves and the digital world today is performed via applications. Enterprise developers and architects around the world are building applications to meet our needs as consumers and professionals, and it turns out we have some very demanding ones, requiring fast, available, responsive applications that are personalized for us and work wherever we happen to be. 

Today’s web, mobile, and IoT applications are highly interactive and require an underlying database that enables personalized, seamless interactions and transactions across all user touchpoints, devices, and channels.  These needs are fundamentally different from those of applications built 10+, and even 40+ years ago, requiring a level of flexibility, agility, and cost-effective scaling that cannot be delivered by traditional relational databases.  

NoSQL databases are designed to address these new needs, and deliver unprecedented agility and flexibility for application developers.  But early NoSQL databases weren’t able to deliver the enterprise-class capabilities required for business-critical applications, particularly in the areas of performance, scalability, high availability, data governance, and security.  And that’s why the market needs NoSQL technology from Couchbase. 

Enter Couchbase: the enterprise-class multicloud to edge NoSQL database for today’s business-critical applications.

Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase offers robust database capabilities required for business-critical enterprise applications on a highly scalable and available NoSQL platform, built on open standards to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases.

We help organizations compete by accelerating the innovation of their enterprise-critical applications. We do this by providing them with a cloud-native distributed database. It is the only database that combines the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, all in a single, elegant platform spanning from any cloud to the edge.

Without disrupting their development or operational environments, businesses can be confident that their applications will deliver uncompromised performance and availability, at any scale, and at any location – now and in the future.  And that’s why over 30% of the Fortune 100 run one or more of their business critical applications on Couchbase.  

Under the Hood: Sustained Differentiation, Profitable Growth, World Class Teams

Our business success to date can be attributed to three strategic pillars: architecting sustained differentiation, delivering long-term profitable growth, and building world class teams.  

Sustained differentiation has been core to our DNA since our founding.  Simply put, the unique architecture of the Couchbase database delivers levels of performance, scale and flexibility from the cloud to the edge not available from other databases.  This industry-leading innovation has been widely recognized, most recently by IDC as an IDC Innovator, and also by Forrester as a leader in its Big Data NoSQL Wave.  Infoworld awarded Couchbase the Editor’s Choice distinction: you can read their product review here. This adds to a long list of industry awards that we have been proud to receive over our history. 

In the area of profitable growth, we focus on winning together as a team to gain the trust of our customers to solve their hardest problems, and to meet their most challenging technology needs. We are proud of the increasing number of organizations who rely on Couchbase, and this fundraising round comes on the heels of a momentous year for us. In our latest fiscal year, we delivered more than 70% total contract value growth, 50%+ new business growth, and 35%+ growth in average subscription deal size.  The company now has nearly $100M in committed annual recurring revenue.  This success allows us to build a sound business over the long-term that enables future investments in products and services to help our customers solve their most critical database and applications challenges.    

The best companies are built by world class teams which are a combination of industry leading talent and a vibrant culture that encourages and enables those people to do the best and most fulfilling work of their careers.  We continue to expand our team across the world, with double digit percentage growth in headcount over the past year.  We continue to enhance our leadership team with key hires across all functions.  We were honored this year to be recognized as one of the Bay Area’s Best Places to Work, a function of the great work of and dedication of our great employees.  

This additional funding will be used to continue our accelerated trajectory with ongoing investments in each of these pillars. More specifically, we will continue to expand feature development in our enterprise NoSQL server and mobile database platform as well as Couchbase Cloud, our fully-managed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS). Now, more than ever, enterprises are accelerating their migration to both NoSQL databases and cloud deployments to increase agility and flexibility while simultaneously reducing costs.

In closing, let me extend a few thank you’s to those who’ve been instrumental in achieving today’s milestone for Couchbase.  First, I’d like to extend a warm welcome to GPI Capital.; we are thrilled to have built this partnership, one that we look forward to for many productive years to come.  I’d also like to thank our existing investors: you’ve been tremendous partners along the way, and we are fortunate to deepen our relationship with you.  

To our customers and partners: thank you for your continued trust in Couchbase. We work every day to exceed your current and future needs and wouldn’t be where we are without you.  During the unprecedented times and beyond, we are here to support you every step of the way. 

Finally, I’d like to offer a sincere thank you to our employees. Your hard work and dedication has led to this momentous event. It’s a testament to our great talent, teamwork, and execution.  Your innovation and perseverance has made us who we are and will help us become the next great enterprise software company.  Great things are ahead.  

Author

Posted by Matt Cain, President & CEO

As CEO, Matt brings nearly two decades of experience leading global organizations to Couchbase. Previously, he was President of Worldwide Field Operations for Veritas Technologies LLC, where he led a 4,200 person team responsible for all aspects of sales, customer retention, channels, services, and support. Prior to then, as Chief Product Officer for Veritas’ $2.5B business, he led strategy, product management, product marketing, engineering, support, hardware operations, and cloud delivery. Matt previously held a variety of senior leadership positions at Symantec Corporation and Cisco Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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