Tessell, a startup that develops multi-cloud database As-a-Service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by Westbridge Capital ahead of plans to expand the market presence and launch an AI-powered conversation database management service.
As data becomes more important than ever, many companies struggle to manage and store it efficiently. In many cases, legacy database solutions are strict and have little flexibility across cloud providers. Meanwhile, most managed database services continue to be fast, fast, fast and costly.
Tessel aims to solve all this on the platform.
Four years ago, the startup leverages decades of database kernel experience from its co-founder to take on existing relational database services, including Amazon’s RDS, providing enhanced operational database management.
“Tessel is a tessellation of enterprise data,” co-founder and CEO Bala Kuchibotra said in an exclusive interview.
Kuchibhotla started Tessell after spending over a decade at Oracle and four years at Nutanix. He saw the opportunity to “rethink” operational data management after considering the issues facing businesses with existing database management services.
Tessell claims it will provide 10 times the performance of existing database management services with a savings of 64-73% within the total cost of ownership over three years, thanks to its NVME infrastructure. The technology eliminates industry-standard I/O operations per second (IOPS) metering, providing high IOPS and low latency along with price predictability. Tessell also provides zero downtime for migrations and works to ensure that the database is maintained 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 major database engines such as MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB.
“For AI applications, you can spin up (or spin up) the databases you need in the Tessel infrastructure,” Kuchibhotla told TechCrunch, adding that Tessell supports both vector extensions and traditional databases with standalone vector databases.
Tessell’s All-Equity Series B Round is also joined by B37 Ventures and Rocketship.vc and existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, which will help Tessell develop AI-powered conversational technology designed to further simplify data management.
The San Ramon-based startup, which has its office in Bengaluru, currently has around 143 employees. It also has 40 customers in India, including Moody’s, Aditya Birla Capital, Tata Capital, Jubilant Ingrevia and Forbes.
With the new funding, Tessel plans to enter Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, expanding to markets in the US and India, and investing more in R&D to enhance its services. Additionally, the startup aims to view analytics as the next possible line of business, allowing data to be funneled from platforms such as Snowflake, Google Bigquery, and Microsoft Fabric for analysis in Tessell.