About Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell, engineers who had previously worked on Google's internal infrastructure, including Google's own globally distributed database systems, and set out to build an open-source database that brought similarly resilient, horizontally scalable distributed database technology to a broader range of companies that couldn't build such systems entirely in-house the way Google had. The company's name and core design philosophy directly reference the cockroach's famed biological resilience: CockroachDB is architected from the ground up to automatically detect and recover from the failure of individual servers, and even entire data centers or cloud regions, without data loss or extended downtime, distributing data redundantly across multiple nodes and locations so that the failure of any single component doesn't take down the overall database or lose committed data.
CockroachDB is designed to be compatible with standard SQL, the query language widely used across traditional relational databases, letting application developers use familiar SQL syntax and tooling rather than needing to learn an entirely new query paradigm, while gaining the horizontal scalability and fault tolerance more commonly associated with newer "NoSQL" style distributed databases that historically sacrificed some of SQL's transactional consistency guarantees in exchange for that scalability. This combination of SQL compatibility with distributed, fault-tolerant architecture has made CockroachDB particularly attractive to companies building applications that need to operate reliably across multiple geographic regions or cloud availability zones, such as global financial services applications, e-commerce platforms, and other systems where both strong data consistency and high availability across a distributed footprint are critical requirements. Cockroach Labs offers both an open-source version of CockroachDB and a fully managed cloud database service. The company has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Altimeter Capital, Bond Capital, and Greenoaks Capital, reaching a valuation exceeding $5 billion, competing with other distributed SQL and NewSQL database vendors including Google Spanner, YugabyteDB, and TiDB.
