Welcome, TigerBeetle!
The world is becoming more transactional. Over the past decade, digital payments have exploded as businesses moved online. Modern software applications generate thousands of API calls a day. Whether it’s an online purchase, a money transfer, or a profile update, transactions are at the heart of every digital interaction. With the rise of autonomous AI agents performing actions on behalf of users through APIs, the need for efficient transaction processing has never been greater.
Most of the systems (i.e. databases) we rely on today for transaction processing were designed 20 to 30 years ago, for a different scale. A single node of your favorite OLTP database can get you pretty far, but you may eventually find yourself on the long journey of horizontal sharding. As the markets for OLTP databases grew, so did their capacity to serve general purpose workloads. Consequently, companies often write thousands of lines of custom logic around their database to make them work for tasks like double-entry accounting (the language of business). The importance of robust transaction processing systems cannot be overstated when you have banks, healthcare systems, small businesses, and government operations depending on them. There’s an opportunity to rethink their design with today’s knowledge and future needs in mind.
The pioneers in every art may plan perfectly but always their first products must be compromises, for they can never obtain the right materials. — Edison As I Know Him
In 2022, I saw Joran Dirk Greef, a Staff Software Engineer at Coil at the time, give a talk about a new database system he was building for an international payment switch. He discussed some of the limitations they encountered with traditional databases and how they realized they would need to start from scratch to achieve the durability and performance required. This led to the creation of TigerBeetle, a new database capable of processing high volumes of transactions on a small hardware footprint. To achieve this, Joran and his team went back to first principles. He viewed each problem that comes up as a thing of itself, to be solved in exactly the right way.
Most database projects I’d come across were making incremental changes to well-known systems but TigerBeetle turned everything on its head. They brought core financial primitives (debits and credits) to the database, implemented new research on storage faults, and leveraged deterministic simulation testing to move faster — all written in Zig. What became clear over time is that TigerBeetle isn’t just a financial database — it’s a transactional database with a state machine applicable to various domains where speed, durability, and consistency are vital. In a world becoming more online and transactional, TigerBeetle has the potential to be foundational infrastructure for modern systems of record.
At Spark, we love to invest in founders pursuing bold visions to create new markets or reinvent old ones. Today, I’m so excited to announce we are leading a $24M Series A investment in TigerBeetle, a company I also had the privilege of partnering with at Amplify during their seed round. Joining us will be existing investors Amplify Partners and Coil, along with angels including Alex Rattray of Stainless, Alex Gallego of RedPanda, Uriel Cohen and Sachin Kumar of Clear Street.
We couldn’t be more thrilled to continue supporting Joran and his team’s ambitious journey to rethink how we build and run transactional systems today. Welcome to the Spark team, TigerBeetle!
