It’s January 25, 2022. We get a cold email from Dave Remy from Event Store, the company behind EventStoreDB, telling us about…
“…an operational database that keeps all the changes in the form of events in contrast to traditional databases that keep only the current state (tongue in cheek, “intentional data loss architecture”). You can think of ESDB as being a log or ledger of the data, the enterprise’s source of truth, which then feeds the rest of the enterprise in real time.”
Having invested in our fair share of data infrastructure companies, we already knew about event sourcing and event driven architectures. But there weren’t really any products that had made implementing these approaches easy for non-academic, non-steeped-in-database-lore engineering teams.
We called all the database experts we knew. We dove deep into operational vs analytical vs streaming data. We messaged users of open source EventStoreDB, and we looked under the hood with paying customers.
Here’s what we found: real enterprises running very real revenue-generating applications, not to mention entire infrastructures, on EventStoreDB.
Many of them had stripped out Rube Goldberg machines made of message queues, ETL/ELT pipelines, multiple databases, and mountains of custom code to make sure that events weren’t lost, that they arrived in the right order, that history could be recreated, that end user facing analytical and BI tools didn’t fall over, etc etc. Where before they had multiple teams operating an unmaintainable mess, now they had one team running one database that was the source of truth for everything else.
We leaned in to lead Event Store’s first institutional round and invited our friends at Creandum, Cocoa, Data Tech Fund, Irregular Expressions, and Common Magic to join us. It’s also the first time we’ve invested based on a cold inbound email—in truth, a rare occurrence in VC investing, but we are always thrilled to embrace outliers.
Fast forward to today.
- Kirk Dunn, of Cloudera fame, whom we had worked with for 5 years previously and had introduced to the company as an angel, came out of retirement to become CEO of the new Event Store, now known as Kurrent.
- Nearly 150 enterprises rely on Kurrent and Kurrent Cloud to be the central source of truth for the events that are their business, such as streams for a particular artist’s song or retail transactions at global scale.
- We led both parts of this funding: today’s $12 million funding announcement completes the total $22 million round. We’re doubling down on our commitment to the Kurrent team.
We have been investing in data infrastructure for nearly a decade. We’ve watched the “modern data stack” grow old in the tooth. Enterprises are spending millions to make uncountable copies of the same piece of information, manipulating and modifying it, moving it back and forth from one system to another, paying a tax to every vendor that touches it.
Kurrent represents a rethinking of the data stack—starting with bringing together the capabilities of a world-class operational database with streaming data services into an event-native data platform. Head over to kurrent.io to read about where they’re headed next.
The future of data infrastructure is going to be simpler and faster and truer. Kurrent, Axiom, Gable, Tinybird, along with some yet-to-be-announced investments, represent us here at Crane hitting the accelerator. Let’s gooooooooooo!
