Our Investment in Ottertune: AI automated Database optimisation platform
We are excited to announce that Race Capital has co-led the $12M Series A for Ottertune, an AI automated Database optimisation platform, alongside our friends at Intel Capital with participation from Accel. We are thrilled to partner with Andy Pavlo, Dana Van Aken and Bohan Zhang on this journey to revolutionize cloud database operations!
Databases are powering most of the apps that we interact with on a daily basis. However, as database usage and demand grow, configuring and optimizing databases become more important and challenging.
To do so optimally, companies and startups need to have ample skilled engineers that understand the nuances of choosing and optimizing for the right storage system, network, CPUs, and memory. In addition, much of this work is still extremely manual to date and requires continuous monitoring.
Ottertune solves this by automating database performance tuning and optimization, using AI to analyze and configure the settings of databases, to enable them to run more efficiently at a fraction of the cost.
Explosive growth of the DBMS Market, but the tools have not caught up
The overall DBMS usage and market size have reportedly grown around 3X in the last decade and reached a size of $64.8B in 2020 with no signs of it slowing down. Relational databases have continued to represent a majority share of the market, capturing 83% of it.
Contrastingly, database optimization and tuning services have seen little innovation and are still handled manually by large teams of DBA — individual changes made to each configuration option through trial and error, and struggling to serve the 100s-1000s of different DBMS instances.
We expect OtterTune to drastically improve the overall developer experience and empower enterprises and DBAs in the space. Enabling them to focus on their core business instead and other higher-impact tasks.
World class researchers from Carnegie Mellon University
We at Race Capital always look to partner with strong technical founders with expert knowledge and Professor Andy Pavlo, Dana Van Aken and Bohan Zhang are perfect examples of this.
OtterTune first started as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University, where Andy is a professor in Databaseology in the Computer Science Department and Dana and Bohan were students of his — focusing on database management systems (DBMS), automated architectures, and transaction processing systems.
Their original thesis, as part of Dana’s PhD dissertation, using ML to optimize for DBMS knob configurations was published in SIGMOD and was very well received by the academic community — as a result, it attracted inbound interest from companies such as Booking.com and Societe Generale asking for their help to optimize their databases.
Strong market demand for their product and expertise eventually led to the formation of OtterTune and there is no better team than Andy, Dana, and Bohan to build this.
Intuitive platform packed with a punch
The platform is easy to use for any development team, even those without DBA experiences. Simply select from a range of target objectives to optimize for (i.e latency, cost, throughput) and OtterTune automatically configures and tunes for over 100 predefined settings to improve the target.
OtterTune currently supports databases on Amazon Web Services (AWS) RDS and Aurora, it securely connects with databases without requiring access to any application data or queries.
To prevent surprising outages and performance drops, OtterTune also offers Health-checks and work-load detection to monitor all databases and make necessary recommendations if they are showing any unhealthy behaviors.
Furthermore, OtterTune is designed with safety in mind and has safeguards and suggested ranges of values for each knob configuration in place to ensure databases operate correctly. In addition, the platform also offers a “Human in the Loop” feature so companies will always have control over its automatic tuning process.
We look forward to working closely with Andy, Dana, Bohan and the OtterTune team to redefine the future of cloud database operations.
