PlanetScale pitch deck to raise $30m Series-B round

This is the PlanetScale pitch deck to raise a $30m series-b round in 2021.

About

PlanetScale is a NewSQL database-as-a-service(DbaaS) based on the open source project. They run the world’s most scalable database clusters with Vitess.

PlanetScale created Vitess, a MySQL sharding solution powering products such as YouTube, Slack, Square and many more. PlanetScale’s expertise helps such businesses scale their new and existing infrastructure faster.

YouTube first built open source software Vitess back in 2010 (when demand for cat videos was at an all-time high) to scale its database infrastructure during times of peak traffic.

Vitess is now housed under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which also hosts the widely-used Google-created open source cloud project Kubernetes, and in 2018, former YouTube employees Sugu Sougoumarane and Jiten Vaidya decided to try to build a business around it.

PlanetScale has since won over customers like Slack, Square, GitHub, and Figma for a managed cloud service for Vitess that’s available for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

“We make it easy for developers to use,” Vaidya told Insider. “We are building something that is state of the art. Developers are used to a certain level of ease of use.”

Building a business off of open source projects is challenging, especially when startups face the risk of competition from cloud giants. AWS, for example, has a habit of selling open source software on its cloud, much to the chagrin of smaller companies that build the tools like Redis Labs, Confluent, and Elastic.

AWS currently has a database scaling product called Amazon Relational Databases, but Vaidya says it’s “day and night compared to our product” and that the startup benefits from its focus on a single tool.

“We are obsessed with this product,” he said.

The firm announced a $30 million Series B round on Wednesday, bring its total raised to $55 million, though it declined to disclose its valuation.

PlanetScale recently hired its chief product officer and several other employees from GitHub

PlanetScale now employs over 60 people and it plans to grow to 90 employees by the end of the year. It will be hiring for its sales, engineering, and support teams.

“People are attracted to coming here and working here because of the type of problems we’re solving,” Vaidya said.

PlanetScale has poached at least 10 employees from GitHub since last May, Insider previously reported. And last September, it hired Sam Lambert, formerly GitHub’s engineering vice president, as its chief product officer. Lambert also previously worked with Vitess at GitHub.

Vaidya said that GitHub is an early supporter of Vitess and a “great customer of ours.”

“We have a fantastic working relationship with them,” Vaidya said. “We have a lot of respect for everything they have with open source. The word is out that we are doing a lot of interesting things with databases. The DNA of the company is from Google, and we’re hiring a lot of people from companies like Dropbox, Sentry, and of course, GitHub.”

Funding rounds

Announced Date	Transaction Name	Number of Investors	Money Raised	Lead Investors
Jun 6, 2021	Series B – PlanetScale	3	$30M	Insight Partners
May 23, 2019	Series A – PlanetScale	2	$22M	Andreessen Horowitz
Dec 19, 2018	Seed Round – PlanetScale	13	$3M	SignalFire

Pitch deck review summary

[pdf-embedder url=”https://wordpress-153384-440792.cloudwaysapps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PlanetScale-Pitch-Deck.pdf” title=”PlanetScale Pitch Deck”]

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