Fauna Raises $27M in Funding and Welcomes New Executive Leadership

Former Okta and Snowflake executives Eric Berg and Bob Muglia join Fauna as CEO and Chairman of the Board as growth accelerates

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#EricBerg—Fauna, the data API for client-serverless applications, today announced that it has raised $27M in new funding led by Madrona Venture Group, with participation from ADDITION and GV. S. Somasegar, Managing Director at Madrona, will join the Fauna board of directors. Also joining this round are developer tools leader Tom Preston Werner, database pioneer Roger Bamford and existing institutional investors including CRV and Quest Ventures.

Fauna also welcomes Eric Berg as its new CEO. Berg is a seasoned enterprise software and SaaS leader. Formerly the Chief Product Officer at Okta, he helped grow Okta from its inception to a global leader in identity with 1300 employees, 4500+ customers and over $300M in revenue as a publicly traded company. Microsoft veteran and former CEO of Snowflake, Bob Muglia, has joined Fauna as Executive Chair and investor. Muglia brings to Fauna over three decades of experience in development tools, databases, and cloud infrastructure. Evan Weaver, co-founder at Fauna, will take on the role of CTO.

“Developers are moving en masse to serverless architectures for new applications, marking the dawn of serverless as the next tool chain for building global, hyperscale apps. FaunaDB plugs in seamlessly into this new ecosystem and uniquely extends the serverless experience all the way to the database,” said S. Somasegar. “This developer journey began with the move to the cloud, but Fauna has correctly identified serverless as the next frontier, and has succeeded in building the database of choice for this new era.”

The Data API for Client-serverless Applications

Modern applications are being reimagined as compositions of serverless APIs and live entirely in the browser. Those applications can be completely new, “greenfield” applications – like a dynamic Jamstack web application, or they can be new functionality that is added to an existing application or service, combining a rich mobile or web client with a serverless back end. Traditional databases were not built for these applications and remain a bottleneck to this transition.

Fauna has transformed the operational database into a data API for client-serverless applications. A web-native GraphQL interface with support for custom business logic and integration with the serverless ecosystem enables developers to simplify code and ship faster. The underlying globally distributed storage and compute engine is fast, consistent, reliable, and integrates a modern approach to security. Itself a serverless offering, Fauna is quick to get started with and lets you experience freedom from database operations at any scale.

With serverless and Jamstack principles fast emerging as the architecture of choice for building new mobile and SaaS applications, Fauna has seen its user community rapidly expand to over 25,000 developers.

“Fauna offers a disruptive value proposition at the operational data layer for developers working on the next generation of mobile and web applications,” said Eric Berg, CEO at Fauna. “Application databases have long been associated with functional and operational friction, while being a core component of any application stack. Fauna has the right architecture, the right team and the right investors to deliver massive value to the industry. I am thrilled to be part of this journey.”

Focus on developer productivity

FaunaDB offers a web-native GraphQL API that is accessible directly from a browser, mobile client or serverless function. Fauna’s unique, serverless query language (FQL) further speeds up development by facilitating queries that encapsulate custom business logic spanning relational, document and graph data. Developers can connect to Fauna using a myriad of JavaScript frameworks such as React, Vue, Next, Angular, and Nuxt, as well as languages such as Python, Go, Ruby, Java, and Scala. FaunaDB also integrates with leading developer tools such as Microsoft VS Code and serverless platforms such Amazon AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare Workers.

Modern, no-compromise, programmable data platform

FaunaDB is backed by a purpose-built distributed storage and compute platform that is fast, consistent and reliable, supporting a modern security infrastructure. Powering FaunaDB is a patent-pending clockless transactional protocol that enforces global data consistency, without sacrificing latency as well as an advanced core that supports multiple data models, and executes computational logic close to the storage. Furthermore, FaunaDB’s multi-cloud footprint protects applications from regional outages and data loss. FaunaDB is secure by default. Its built-in attribute based access control (ABAC) capabilities enable developers to implement complex security rules with ease, and integrate seamlessly with third party security services.

100% freedom from database operations

Delivered as a serverless API, FaunaDB eliminates the manual effort, the operational complexity, and the administrative costs typically associated with the use of databases. With Fauna, developers can set up a complete and powerful data back end in minutes. Its elastic architecture delivers throughput on-demand, without manual provisioning or service reconfiguration, preventing application failures from unexpected spikes in load. With FaunaDB, developers no longer have to worry about routine tasks such as sharding, capacity planning, data replication and redundancy, or cluster management, no matter the scale or size of the application.

“The Fauna team truly understands what the next generation of web technologies require to succeed. Our selection and use of FaunaDB is based on its built-in support of next-generation serverless stacks with GraphQL, global data and on-demand scalability, and the ability to compose powerful business logic with FQL,” said Marc Ammann, Principal at Matter Supply Co, a creative technology studio based in Medellin and Portland.

With its serverless approach to data, FaunaDB creates a simpler and more direct path for developers to build and ship an application from idea to execution by eliminating the manual grunt work involved in building a secure and scalable application data infrastructure.

“The explosive growth of the serverless and Jamstack communities has created a need for a ubiquitous, developer-friendly data API that only FaunaDB and its unique architecture can provide,” said Evan Weaver, co-founder and CTO of Fauna. “We are committed to growing the ecosystem and helping developers build better software faster. I’m grateful for the support of Bob, Eric, and our new and existing investors in our mission.”

About Fauna

Fauna is the data API for client-serverless applications. With Fauna, developers can simplify code, reduce costs, and ship faster by replacing their entire database infrastructure with a highly productive, programmable, yet operations-free data API that combines the ease of GraphQL with power of custom business logic, and is powered by a modern, globally distributed storage and compute platform.

Innovators like Nextdoor, Hannon Hill, ShiftX and Matter Supply trust Fauna to power their applications. Backed by premier venture investors Madrona Venture Group, ADDITION, GV, and CRV, Fauna is a 100% remote organization with an experienced leadership team hailing from Microsoft, Okta, Twitter, Elastic, Juniper and Oracle. For more information visit fauna.com or follow us at @fauna.