Basho takes $25M to hustle harder in the NoSQL database wars

Basho Technologies might not be the best known database company out there. But the company has been picking up bigger deals, and the momentum ought to continue thanks to a $25 million funding round the startup is announcing today.

“I think we have a good foundation to spring forward and jump ahead and become the No. 1 leader in this space in the not-short term race,” Adam Wray, Basho’s chief executive, told VentureBeat in an interview.

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Basho is the startup behind the Riak open-source key-value store — one flavor of NoSQL database. But it’s a crowded field. The presumptive leader in the NoSQL world is MongoDB, which, after raising $80 million recently, is headed toward an initial public offering. And DataStax, pushing the Cassandra distributed database, is also on a roll, having completed a $106 million funding round a few months back. There’s also Couchbase, which picked up a $60 million round last year.

Even so, Wray is convinced that companies can employ commercial versions of the Riak database at scale for a wide variety of purposes, even as a replacement for relational databases from legacy vendors like Oracle. The Riak Enterprise commercially available software comes with replication of data across multiple data centers.

Last year the company won “numerous” multimillion-dollar deals, and bookings in the second half of the year were up 88 percent over that same period in 2013, according to a statement. The customer count is just under 200, Wray said. That includes Rovio, Tapjoy, Turner Broadcasting System, and the Weather Co.

Basho started in 2008 and is based in Bellevue, Wash. Around 120 people work for the company; by year’s end the headcount should lie somewhere between 150 and 200.

Georgetown Partners led the new round in Basho, which has now raised about $65 million, Wray said.