Why Georgian is Investing in SurrealDB

The proliferation of unstructured data has, in our view, made building modern software applications more exciting, but also more expensive. 

Software engineers today know the pain of building applications. While building a piece of software, an engineer may run into any (or all) of the following issues: 

• Having to run and maintain multiple databases for the application, 
• Using different query languages for each database and 
• Combining different data types while maintaining existing data logic. 

All of this results in engineers spending less time building their applications and more time configuring a complex back end. These issues are further compounded by the increasing use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the significant volume of data required for training and fine-tuning.

For these reasons, we’re pleased to announce our investment in SurrealDB, which provides an innovative approach to data storage and management through its multi-model database.

SurrealDB has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by FirstMark and Georgian, with participation from Crew Capital and Alumni Ventures. This latest round of funding brings SurrealDB’s total to $26 million.

SurrealDB’s database allows software developers to store their data in various formats – such as tables, documents, graphs and vectors – in a single database instead of managing separate databases for each format. Unlike legacy databases, SurrealDB is programmed in Rust (a modern, performant language) and is designed from scratch as a multi-model database.

This approach is intended to reduce the cost associated with managing multiple databases, reduce storage and compute costs and improve efficiency from a workflow and performance standpoint, enabling engineers to spend more time building applications rather than managing backend integrations. 

Georgian’s own AI Lab used SurrealDB to help inform the diligence process, and found it so useful that the team continues to use it to manage data related to vector database benchmarking.

While just in its third year of operation since its founding in 2022, SurrealDB has shown impressive traction through its open-source libraries, which have already received over 25,000 stars on GitHub. According to our research, this makes SurrealDB one of the fastest-growing repos we have seen. Plus – the team has just announced the beta launch of SurrealDB Cloud. 

SurrealDB is led by Co-founders Tobie Morgan Hitchcock (CEO) and Jaime Morgan Hitchcock (COO). SurrealDB is a product of Tobie’s academic work at the University of Oxford, combined with his own practical experience working with databases. Tobie is focused on the long-term vision of the multi-model database market, while Jaime complements his product vision and technical depth as the leader for people, go-to-market and business operations.

We look forward to partnering with Tobie, Jaime and the rest of the SurrealDB team on their impressive growth journey. SurrealDB provides an innovative approach to data storage and management through its multi-model database. We’re excited to partner with the company on its next chapter.