NorthScale (now Couchbase) Announces $10 Million in Funding, New CEO

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – May 18, 2010 – NorthScale, Inc., the leading provider of a new generation of elastic data infrastructure software, today announced it has secured $10 million in a Series B round of financing led by venture capital firm Mayfield Fund, with participation from Series A investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in innovation around noSQL database technologies and drive market adoption of NorthScale’s family of scale-out data solutions for web applications and cloud computing. The company also announced that Bob Wiederhold has joined NorthScale as president and chief executive officer, bringing with him more than 25 years of high technology experience.

Funding Highlights

• NorthScale, which emerged from stealth in March 2010, was founded by leaders of the open source memcached project, a data infrastructure technology at the core of 18 of the top 20 most heavily trafficked websites, and thousands of others.
• NorthScale is building on this foundation to deliver a new class of data management software – elastic data infrastructure – that offers substantial cost, performance and scalability advantages over relational database technology, for the vast majority of data associated with modern web applications and cloud computing environments.
• The new funding will be used to continue the company’s investment in noSQL database technology innovation and drive market adoption of NorthScale’s family of elastic data solutions, including NorthScale Memcached Server and NorthScale Membase Server.
• Mayfield Fund led the round, with pro rata investment by existing investors Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners. Mayfield Fund Managing Director Robin Vasan has joined NorthScale’s board of directors.

Bob Wiederhold Highlights

• Bob Wiederhold joins NorthScale as president and chief executive officer.
• Most recently, Bob served as chairman, CEO and president of Transitive Corporation, the leader in cross-platform virtualization, acquired by IBM in 2008.
• Bob brings more than two decades of senior management experience in software and services to NorthScale.  He has demonstrated continued success in managing privately funded companies from the start-up phase to multi-million dollar entities.  In addition to Transitive this includes:
• Cadence Design Systems, Inc., which he joined in 1985 as an early-stage start-up and helped grow to more than $1.5 billion during his 13 years in several executive management roles.
• Tality Corporation, whose revenues and size grew to almost $200 million and 1,500 employees worldwide during his tenure as president and CEO.