When Beaver Creator Serge Rider started building an open source database management tool in 2013, probably having no idea that 10 years later, it would boast over 8 million users. The open source product proved so popular that he launched a company to support it in 2017 and began building a commercial product for users with business requirements.
That business product has more than 5,000 paying customers today, and the company decided the time was right to make an initial investment of $6 million to take advantage of the growing popularity of the product.
What is this product that so many people are using? CEO Tatiana Krupeny says it’s an administrative tool that allows anyone to access data from a variety of sources.
“DBeaver provides a GUI interface that connects to all data sources and data stores, enables special extensions for big data databases, and includes add-on features such as a data viewer, editor, mock data generator, metadata browsing. and visual query builders, allowing users to dynamically access all of their databases while working in one environment,” according to the company.
Krupeny says this capability puts data management within the reach of not only the most technical data engineers, but also people in other business functions, who normally wouldn’t have access to tools like this.
“So DBeaver is the universal database administration tool, and we do everything that people need to do with the data… Most of our users are very technical people, like database administrators or developers, but at the same time, we have data analysts, different types. of managers, financial analysts and machine learning specialists. So really, anyone who needs to work with data can use DBeaver,” he told TechCrunch.
For the first few years, Rider just built a website and people discovered the open source tool, but when he put it on GitHub in 2016, it really took off and quickly grew to a community of over 300,000 users. When Krupeny and Rider started the company in 2017, it was becoming difficult to manage the needs of such a large community and with a full-time job, and that’s when they officially launched the company. When they released the commercial version, they sold their first license the next day because people in the community wanted to support them financially.
The main difference between open source and commercial is how the product tends to be used. For an individual developer connecting to a database, the open source product will probably suffice, but if you work for a larger organization with cloud infrastructure and security requirements, the commercial version will probably suit your needs better. needs. Paying clients include IBM, Samsung and Moody’s (and a few other big names he couldn’t share publicly).
Today the company has 40 employees and intends to remain lean. Part of the benefit of having a committed community of developers involved with your open source product is that they can help add features to the product, such as translating it into different languages. She says that building a diverse company is one of the core values and that they have a diverse team right now in all aspects of the organization.
Today’s $6 million seed was led by Headline with participation from PTV.
