Database startup Cockroach Labs Inc. has achieved unicorn status after raising $160 million at a $2 billion valuation, double what it was worth last May.

The round, disclosed today, was led by Altimeter Capital. It also saw the participation of other familiar names from the tech investment ecosystem including Alphabet Inc.’s GV venture capital arm, Index Ventures and Tiger Global, among others.

Cockroach Labs provides a cloud-native SQL database called CockroachDB that is compatible with Kubernetes. The database’s name is a nod to its resilience: CockroachDB can keep a company’s information accessible even in the event of a major technical malfunction, such as if an entire rack of servers inside a data center goes offline. 

One of the key factors behind the system’s resilience is that it’s based on a distributed architecture. CockroachDB deployments consist not of one centralized database but rather multiple, smaller database instances that can be distributed across multiple locations.

When one instance goes offline, user requests are simply rerouted to the others. CockroachDB also has a feature called multi-active availability for preventing the data accuracy errors that sometimes occur when a malfunctioning database instance is repaired and reconnected to a deployment.

Cockroach Labs argues that it’s in a strong position to capture what it describes as the “third and most significant wave of data moving to the cloud.” The first type of information that was moved to the cloud en masse, the startup says, was application-specific data. That was followed by companies shifting the records they use in their analytics projects to platforms such as Snowflake Inc.’s data warehouse. 

Now, Cockroach Labs argues, a third, potentially even bigger trend is forming of organizations shifting so-called transactional data to public clouds. The term transactional data refers to high-volume business records such as invoices and package shipping logs that are vital to a company’s day-to-day operations but not always used for analytics. 

Cockroach Labs’ value proposition has drawn interest not just from venture capitalists. The startup says its revenue more than doubled over the past year, as did the size of its installed base, which now includes big companies such as Comcast Corp., DoorDash Inc. and headphone maker Bose Corp. Half of the startup’s customers use the managed cloud-based version of its database, which is available on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud under a per-hour pricing model.

Cockroach Labs is “hiring in every department” with plans to use the new funds to accelerate product development. One of the items on the startup’s near-term engineering roadmap is a free product version for the education sector and small-scale software projects. The core features of CockroachDB are already available under an open-source license on GitHub.  

Cockroach Labs’ founders, Peter Mattis, Spencer Kimball and Ben Darnell (pictured), worked at Google LLC as engineers before launching the startup in 2015. Cockroach Labs has raised a total of $355 million in outside funding since then.

Photo: Cockroach Labs