Xata launches a serverless database with the usability of a spreadsheet

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve successfully raised a Series A investment of $30M, co-lead by Redpoint and Index Ventures. This will help us build the go-to serverless database that engineers have been waiting for, with powerful features including a fully serverless design that provides automatic scaling, ACID transactions, database branches, zero-downtime migrations, and a full-text search engine with analytics. All of these features are available in conjunction with a beautiful and natural user interface (UI) that feels like a simple spreadsheet, but is capable of inter-table relationships and more.

With this investment, we also formed a new board of directors. We are incredibly proud to announce that Xata’s board is fully composed of women. Myself (Monica Sarbu) as CEO and founder, Erica Brescia from Redpoint as the director of the board, and Erin Price-Wright from Index Ventures as a board observer. Erica was recently COO at GitHub and co-founder of Bitnami, while Erin has worked previously at Palantir and serves on the boards of companies like Strapi and ClickHouse. Erica and Erin are some of the most capable and impressive people we have met, and we are beyond excited to be working closely together towards creating a game changing database experience for the mass market.

We were able to successfully raise this funding round because a lot of people believe in Xata. Here's what some people are saying.

Monica is a truly special, powerhouse of a leader and her vision for delivering a serverless database that combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with robust, globally distributed and infinitely scalable infrastructure is incredibly exciting. We have seen from our investments in Snowflake, Cockroach Labs and others just how big businesses like Xata can become with the right product and leadership. We’re thrilled to be partnering with Monica and team to build Xata. --Erica Brescia (Managing Director, Redpoint; ex-COO GitHub and Founder of Bitnami)

We are delighted to be working closely with the team at Xata as they shape their vision. Monica Sarbu models AWS’s builder DNA and we support her commitment to driving diversity in tech. --Tanuja Randery (Vice President, Amazon Web Services EMEA)

When I started Vercel and Next.js, I dreamt of a data layer that’d be friendly for devs and non-devs alike. It’s finally here: Xata delivers on a great developer experience and a gorgeous admin UX. --Guillermo Rauch (Founder & CEO, Vercel)

The idea for Xata formed as we were working on a non-profit centered around mentoring underrepresented communities in tech during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we wanted to minimize our operational overhead, we chose to use Jamstack and serverless technologies. This worked well, especially thanks to platforms like Netlify and Vercel, but we also needed a database–and that part was not as easy.

We eventually chose Airtable for the non-profit which gave us a simple data API and took care of most concerns. It also gave us a very nice UI that we could use as an internal tool to do the matching between mentors and mentees. This worked well for a while, but we’ve found Airtable to be rather limited in the amount of data we could store, as well as lacking more developer-centric functionality like transactions and constraints, which would greatly benefit our non-profit.

After speaking with a number of developers, we were surprised to find out that using Airtable as the main database is more common than we thought and the systems that people build on top of Airtable can get quite complex. The room for improvement in the database space from a usability and developer experience standpoint is what inspired us to start Xata. Our purpose as a company is to make databases a joy to use for everyone building an app today, not just a select few.

We’re currently in private beta and are inviting developers from an internal waitlist to try Xata out. If you have a particular use case for which you’d like to try Xata, please reach out to us.

While we are extremely excited about our growth as a company, we cannot finish this blog post without acknowledging the current heartbreaking humanitarian crisis in the Ukraine. We are keeping an eye on the situation and will seize every opportunity we encounter to support truth and justice in this time. We are making personal donations to organizations that are helping those most affected by the war.