In the cloud-native environment, where multiple databases present substantial migration challenges, an early-stage startup named Ariga is pioneering a novel solution. Ariga’s primary aim is to simplify database management by enabling users to define database schemas as code.
Ariga recently secured a Series A funding round worth $15 million, building upon an earlier undisclosed seed investment of $3 million. These investments follow the burgeoning success of Ariga’s open-source project and the inception of their software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, for which they’ve begun acquiring paying customers.
Ariga’s co-founders, CTO Rotem Tamir and CEO Ariel Mashraki, recognize the complexities and potential pitfalls inherent in database management. They founded Ariga to combat these issues, inspired by the way companies have managed to diminish infrastructure management complexity through declarative coding.
Ariga’s platform enables users to plan, verify, execute, and monitor their database’s desired state. This methodology, according to Tamir, hasn’t been adopted widely in the database space due to various reasons.
Ariga developed an open-source tool called Atlas to implement their vision. Written in Go, Atlas facilitates the management of numerous databases. It accepts the preferred state of a database and calculates the changes necessary to achieve it. It also features an internal safety engine that performs checks and verifies changes against policies, akin to static code analysis.
Mashraki reports that Atlas, since its 2022 launch, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and run tens of thousands of times per day, indicating that it addresses a prevalent issue in database management.
By providing Atlas as an open-source tool, Ariga enables database makers to adapt it to their databases, increasing its usability across various products. This year, Ariga also launched Atlas Cloud, the SaaS version of their database management tool, and has already started attracting paying customers.
Despite being a small team of around a dozen employees, Ariga is expanding its workforce. Their open-source nature has allowed them to attract diverse global interest, with contributors hailing from countries including Iraq, Gaza, Germany, Australia, and Brazil.
The recent Series A funding round was led by Tiger Global and TLV Partners, with additional contributions from undisclosed angel investors.
