SaaS needs a new data system. That's the driving idea behind Nile, a startup that aims to create this data system with serverless Postgres at its core. Co-founded by Sriram Subramanianformer head of cloud engineering at Confluent, and Gwen Shapiraformer engineering lead of the Kafka team at Confluent, Nile, is building this new data solution with built-in support for multi-tenancy as its core primitives.
The company announced today that it has raised an $11.6 million seed funding round led by Benchmark's Eric Vishria, who was also Confluent's original lead investor.
“While my team was building the multi-tenant product for Confluent, I didn't realize that this is something that every SaaS in the world is multi-tenant, they all need to handle multi-tenant data, and we have to keep building these things from scratch because there is no system that do it,” Shapira told me.
Subramanian noted that virtually all databases on the market today were created as general-purpose tools. “When you do that, you end up having to build something that's the lowest common denominator across all the different use cases,” he explained. “Based on our experience building Confluent into a SaaS company for six years, we found a lot of challenges in leveraging the database the way we wanted, and not just the database itself, but also solving all the issues.” of data around it that were essentially dealing with integration with the database. This could be authentication, billing, etc.
Unsurprisingly, that's exactly the problem Nile is trying to solve. The idea here is that every SaaS company has a data layer at its core, and since we're talking about SaaS companies, they all have to solve the multi-tenant problem in one way or another, regardless of whether they're in the B2B or B2C space. . .
Typically that meant over-provisioning servers to be able to react to spikes (and accepting the additional cost of doing so) or moving specific clients to their own databases and clusters to ensure isolation (for both security and performance reasons).
“We have many incident stories from well-known businesses we speak to where this tenant affected another incident, or they upgraded (or didn't upgrade) and that negatively affected some of the other customers. They needed to roll back, but only for some of the customers, and it ended up being a weeks-long incident as they tried to manually make surgical changes to the correct customers. “It’s a problem that seemed endemic,” Shapira said.
Image credits: Nile
Traditionally, the team argued, solving problems related to data and database management was always an application problem rather than a database problem. Nile is changing this by making multi-tenancy a core feature of its Postgres solution and by separating the data layer from the compute layer. That means users can connect a virtual tenant database to a shared compute service or attach a dedicated compute node to it, for example. Developers only need to define which database the application needs to communicate with and Nile then provides isolation at the session and, soon, connection level.
Why Postgres? According to Subramanian, that is where the market is heading. Virtually every company the team spoke to was betting on Postgres. “It's pretty obvious that it will become the Linux of databases,” he said. The fact that it is open source and easily extensible also allows Nile to do what he does.
“We talk to hundreds of SaaS companies and when you ask them: How do you get in line? How do you manage jobs? How are analyzes done? How is unstructured data made? How is big data done? How do you do this? How do you do that? And every time it's: oh, we do it in Postgres. Can Postgres do that? Oh yes, absolutely,” Shapira explained. “Does that work as well as the alternatives? Sometimes yes. Sometimes not. But SaaS companies, 90% of the time, seem to be very happy to do absolutely everything with Postgres.”
In addition to speeding up development, since developers won't have to build their own systems to manage multiple tenants and the authentication layer required for that, the Nile team also maintains that their service can reduce costs by centralizing databases in a single location (even when tenants may be in different locations) and facilitating scaling through horizontal sharding.
On top of all this, Nile also offers features for user management, customer dashboards, vector embeddings for ai use cases (based on pgvector), and more. The company offers a limited free plan (currently behind a waiting list), with paid plans still in the works.
