Open supply database supplier MariaDB is the most recent to capitalize on an IPO pattern that it’s hoping will not show lengthy within the enamel. This morning, the corporate introduced that it closed a $104 million Sequence D enterprise spherical because the lead-in for the proposed IPO that may record on the New York Inventory Trade. The IPO would come by means of a merger with Angel Pond Holdings, a particular function acquisition firm (SPAC). The Sequence D financing values the corporate as a sub-unicorn $672 million.
The message from MariaDB is that the financings won’t change its present course. The title will change barely to MariaDB plc, however the administration staff, led by CEO Michael Howard, is predicted to remain in place. As for the SPAC, Angel Pond was established by former Goldman Sachs companion Theodore Wang and Shihuang “Simon” Xie, who co-founded Alibaba.
Headquartered in Helsinki, MariaDB started life as a fork of MySQL after it was acquired by Oracle (as a part of the Solar Microsystems acquisition) in 2009. Benefiting from the pluggable engine structure that originated with MySQL, MariaDB has advanced right into a supplier of a product portfolio that’s extraordinarily (or perhaps overly) various for a corporation of its measurement.
So here is the most recent depend. It begins with the Enterprise Server, which is the commercially hardened model of the open supply group version. The Enterprise Server is obtainable with a selection of storage engines: the unique InnoDB engine for widespread, single-node transaction processing eventualities and MyRocks for write-intensive eventualities related to IoT use instances. Then there’s the distributed, shared-nothing ColumnStore for analytics, and Xpand, the distributed transaction database (coming from the Clustrix acquisition) that has parallels with Google Cloud Spanner and CockroachDB.
To date, it is a fairly easy portfolio. However we’re not executed but.
There’s MaxScale, which offers a proxy that abstracts excessive availability, failover, and safety for simplifying operations, and Galera Cluster, the unique multimaster open supply implementation, which shouldn’t be confused with Xpand.
The icing on the cake is SkySQL, the managed database cloud service that’s at present out there on AWS and Google Cloud. It affords a selection of a transaction, analytic, or combo service that features the now-familiar optimizations for routing queries to the row or column shops.
MariaDB is banking on the hope that the window hasn’t closed for IPOs after a awful January. Final 12 months’s highlights counted Confluent’s $828 million IPO in June within the information world. That was adopted a few months later by Databricks elevating a ridiculous $1.6 billion Sequence H, which supplied sufficient left over for Databricks itself to share the proceeds, to not point out fueling hypothesis on when, not whether or not, the corporate would trip its $38 billion valuation to an IPO.
Evidently, MariaDB secured its SPAC deal just below the wire. SPACs, which had been a sizzling pattern a 12 months in the past, is now dealing with stiff headwinds. Also referred to as “clean examine” companies, SPACs are publicly-traded shell corporations arrange particularly for buying non-public corporations and taking them public. In impact, SPACs present a shortcut to going public as a result of, as publicly-traded shell corporations, the acquired entity doesn’t must endure all of the disclosures in any other case required for IPOs.
However the air is now going out of the SPAC bubble for numerous causes, corresponding to looming regulation, increased rates of interest, and disappointing outcomes for numerous SPAC points over the previous 12 months.
For MariaDB, the hope is all within the timing.