EU Bank invests 25M euros in MariaDB
Tue 9 May 2017
The European Investment Bank, the official bank of the European Union, has announced a 25M euro investment in MariaDB.
MariaDB is one of the most popular and fastest-growing open source database solutions in the world. The investment from the European Investment Bank (EIB) will be used for product innovation and global expansion, with additions to sales and marketing worldwide, and new hires in the Helsinki engineering department.
MariaDB was created by some of the original developers of MySQL and is the database of choice for Wikipedia, WordPress and Google, among others. The company runs a foundation that receives funding from corporate and individual sponsors, and is guaranteed to remain open source.
The decision to use EIB funding to assist in the global expansion of MariaDB was made, in part, by the rosy forecast for the future of open-source database usage. The EIB announcement of funding noted that the popularity of open source database systems has risen 35% in the last four years, and that 70% of new in-house applications are expected to be developed on open source databases by the end of next year.
EIB Vice President Ambroise Fayolle said that the bank was drawn to MariaDB because the company is strong both in innovation and potential for expansion.
“This is also what the Investment Plan for Europe is about,” he said. “Strengthening Europe’s global competitiveness by supporting high-skilled employment opportunities and enhancing Europe’s position as a major technology supplier.”
MariaDB was included on the list of the top 10 enterprise database systems of 2017, where it was noted that the company was gaining market share at the expense of MySQL. Since inception, MariaDB has become the default database in the LAMP stack from RedHat, and the cloud stacks from Pivotal and Rackspace.
MariaDB CEO Michael Howard said that the investment from the EIB will fund the next phase of growth as the company expands across Europe, America and Asia. It will also be used, he said, “to expand our product capabilities and continue to develop features that make MariaDB the easiest to use, the easiest to extend and the easiest to deploy in any environment.”
