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Read the pitch deck that got VCs like Alexis Ohanian to invest $12 million in a little-known database software project that’s exploding in popularity with developers
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QuestDB began as a “big idea that wasn’t really being used by anybody,” CEO Nicholas Hourcard said.
- Then its database grew a loyal following among developers, who spread the word on Reddit and GitHub.
- That buzz led to a $12 million series A from investors like 468 Capital and Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian.
QuestDB CEO Nicholas Hourcard says the company, which offers an open source database, started out as a “big idea that wasn’t really used by anybody.”
“There were some use cases, but we didn’t have tangible proof points to demonstrate it to investors,” he tells insider.
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It wasn’t until the founders graduated from Y Combinator as a part of the fund’s summer 2020 cohort that it started to gain traction — and eventually, a $12 million series A investment backed by top investors.
Following participation in the legacy Silicon Valley accelerator, QuestDB, which began as an unknown GitHub project in 2019, quickly began to amass a loyal following among developers by enabling them to process and monitor data at fast speeds, all via open source. The company currently has a fast-growing community of over 900 developers on Slack and 70 code contributors on Github, as well as major clients like Yahoo and Airbus.
Now, Hourcard sees the relationship with this developer community as the company’s greatest strength. In fact, it was the developer buzz on Reddit and Github — where the project currently has over 5000 stars — that caught the attention of investors.
“I was introduced to Nic through my network, because the project had received a lot of traction on GitHub,” Florian Leibert, general partner at 468 Capital, which led the round, tells Insider. He says the GitHub project, which had gone viral online, convinced him to invest. Sebastian Pahl, cofounder of Docker, and Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, also decided to invest after seeing the company make waves among developers online.
With a fresh $12 million in the bank, QuestDB plans to spend the next six months doubling its 15-person team and broadening its use cases. The first move, Hourcard says, is to integrate with Python, a programming language with over 8.2 million users worldwide.
Read the pitch deck that convinced Alexis Ohanian and other open source leaders to invest $12 million.
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