Tessell snags $60M to drive data management at scale

Summary

Tessell, a startup developing a multi-cloud database-as-a-service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital ahead of its plans to expand its market presence and launch an AI-powered conversational database management service. As data becomes more critical than ever, many companies are struggling to manage and store it efficiently. Legacy database solutions are often rigid, offering little flexibility across cloud providers. Meanwhile, most managed database services remain costly, commanding high rates for high performance. Tessell aims to solve all this with its platform. The four-year-old startup leverages decades of database kernel experience from its co-founders to offer enhanced operational database management, taking on existing relational database services including Amazon’s RDS. “Tessell is a tessellation of enterprise data,” said co-founder and CEO Bala Kuchibhotla in an exclusive interview. Kuchibhotla started Tessell after spending over a decade at Oracle and four years at Nutanix. He saw an opportunity to “reimagine” operational data management after looking at the problems companies face with existing database management services. Tessell claims to deliver 10x the performance of existing database management services with a 64-73% savings within a three-year total cost of ownership thanks to its NVMe infrastructure. The technology does away with the industry-standard input-output operations per second (IOPS) metering and provides high IOPS and low latency, along with price predictability. Tessell also offers zero downtime on migrations and works to ensure databases stay up and running even if one cloud service goes down. Tessell is compatible with all four major cloud service providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. It also supports leading database engines like MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. “If you are an AI application, you can spin up [or] spin down the databases tha...