E-commerce group Alibaba has led a $27m tranche of funding for Finland-based database software provider MariaDB, enabling it to close its series C round at $54m.
The round also included Intel Capital, the corporate venturing unit of chipmaker Intel, California Technology Ventures, Tesi, SmartFin Capital and Open Ocean. Alibaba agreed to provide approximately $23m of the funding, according to a TechCrunch report in September this year.
The multilateral European Investment Bank had invested $27.2m in May this year to make up the first tranche of the round.
Founded in 2009 as SkySQL, MariaDB has developed an open source database management system that is compatible with many existing software platforms.
The company, which has now raised approximately $93m in funding, recently expanded its offering to include data warehousing for high-performance analytics and a database for transactional workload.
Intel Capital and California Technology Ventures provided $9m for MariaDB in January 2016, having already backed its $20m series B in 2013 alongside state-owned Finnish Industry Investment, Open Ocean and Spintop Private Partners.
Venture capital firm Runa Capital invested $3.4m in MariaDB in 2015 according to Russian press reports.
Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB, said: “From global banks to leading telecommunication companies, MariaDB is selected over proprietary offerings for its complete set of database features built for the next generation of applications.
“This investment allows MariaDB to further accelerate growth, while delivering new solutions for the cloud and automation through machine learning.”