For teams that can’t slow down and can’t go wrong.

Cockroach Labs was founded by three former Google engineers who decided to build a new database for a cloud-first world. CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database that is built to support the systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure. A decade on, Continuum was built to keep thousands of databases correct while they appear, grow and disappear on their own.

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2015

Year founded

Years in production

$633M

Total raised

5,000

Largest node deployment

Built out of necessity

Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell met at Google, where they spent a decade building infrastructure at a scale not seen elsewhere at the time. When Kimball and Mattis left to build a photo-sharing company, they encountered the limitations of available databases and an unacceptable trade-off between resilience at scale and transactional correctness. That experience sparked the idea for CockroachDB.

Kimball wrote the first design in 2014 and shared it on GitHub. The project won Open Source Rookie of the Year before it had a business plan. The following year, Benchmark Capital led a $6.3 million seed round, with Google Ventures, Sequoia and FirstMark alongside. Their premise was that the trade-off wasn't necessary. A database could lose a machine, a data center or a region and still keep every transaction correct.

Today, CockroachDB runs workloads that can't fail. Banks, payment networks and health systems are among those where an outage is a headline and a lost transaction a liability. Our clients can't choose between correctness and availability.