SurrealDB has raised a $23m Series A Boost: An interview with the two founders!

0:00Tobie:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today I have got two great guests, long-time friends of the show. How are you guys doing? Welcome. How are you? Thank you, Seb. We're doing great. By the way, I just want to shout out to you, man. You're doing a fantastic job with Scaling Europe. Keep the way you're doing. We love it. Big fans and friends. Well, yeah, I'm very grateful for your support over the journey. I absolutely love you guys. You guys are absolutely crushing it. So tell me, what's the news?

0:23Jaime:there we go what um we've got a big announcement uh coming out 3.0 culmination of a lot of work over the last year and almost year and a half actually yeah um massive improvements all around and and with that uh we're also announcing a kind of extension or a new round of funding uh to increase our uh trajectory as we go forward amazing it's okay it's a big a big day for the

0:47Tobie:team big day for you guys an additional 23 million dollars that you're sort of adding to the series a amazing Chalfant Ventures Begin Capital like where did this money come from like why are they coming on board what kind of gave them the conviction to come on board with you guys so good questions I mean we did our A1 obviously co-ed by First Market Georgian First Market our initial investors in the seed round shout out to Matt we love him and then obviously from this point of view we had no European or UK investors whatsoever and for us we found that it would be quite important so speaking to Mike Chalfant for quite a while now and Mike is brilliant.

1:23Tobie:So we brought Mike in this round along with our friends at Begin Capital and so yeah, closing off the A2 round at 38 million. So it's been a busy few months. Busy end of the last year as well for that but yeah, couldn't be more happy with the team we've got at the moment and also looking forward to expanding with the help and their expertise too. Amazing. Tell me about 3.0.

1:45Jaime:As I said before, massive release. Obviously, you know, the ecosystem over the last couple of years has changed a lot you know goes without saying with ai and people building agents and in a way cerulibu has been perfectly poised for this this change changing infrastructure changing the way people build apps and and changing kind of what's being built uh whether that's from a kind of indie hacker developer all the way up to enterprise so you know this is cerulibu has always been you know well positioned for this being multi-model with the support of document relational graph time series. But really, this is about making it more performant, making it easier to scale, making it go from, you know, embedded edge device in the field all the way up to something that handles terabytes or petabytes of data, yet is able to handle the real time workloads that AI agents or AI applications need.

2:37Jaime:So really, it's about that. I mean, we've got some great new functionality and features as well. We have file support, you know, sitting on top of object storage like s3 amazon s3 um we have api endpoints we have new um web assembly functions so people can bring their own logic right into the database as well but really it's about it's about building on our on our foundation and making it the best database for people to build agents and and other applications in the ai ecosystem today i mean yeah that's exactly what i felt like you've got

3:05Tobie:the tailwinds behind you know you've been building this product at the same time as the market has been exploding what kind of use cases have you been seeing what kind of things are people using surreal db4 use cases touch on that yeah i think you know predominantly everything we're seeing

3:20Jaime:nowadays is some form of multi-model requirement for ai whether that is you know something simpler such as product recommendation or ad serving or something even more complex like a company-wide agent that handles you know all the different types of of data that an organization might want to kind of access or analyze. But generally, it's everything related to AI, right? People taking their current projects and extending of AI or people going into a completely new project, building a completely new project, which is completely focused on AI. We do have the odd customer, the odd client using CeruleeBee as a replacement for a different or an older database where they want to kind of modernize it.

4:03Jaime:But I'd say generally, it's that with the requirements of the AI industry as we see it nowadays.

4:11Tobie:And how have you seen it change over the last couple of years? You know, the market has exploded. Even the last couple of weeks, we've seen the release and the explosion of like Claudebot. Has this made a real tangible impact on the way people are using the product, the way growth has gone? Can you see that?

4:25Jaime:It's a really good question. I think, you know, yes, from a developer point of view, from a single developer or indie hacker or small business, the way that people are building applications has completely changed. And, you know, now you use your your AI or your LLM, your kind of developer environment and you it builds things for you. You don't really have to understand that in enterprises. You can't really do that yet. Yes, you can use it to improve and help. You still have to understand and have to have a very significant understanding of infrastructure and scaling and availability and privacy and security.

5:00Jaime:You know, that's that's obviously Claudebot was amazing. It's incredible that you can do things. it's obviously had a bit of a time with the security side but that's all going to change but I think for enterprises it's about being able to access large amounts of data on very different types of backends or storage endpoints and being able to do that in a real time way constantly being able to see the latest data and analyze the latest data and react on that latest data so yes the industry the way that people are building apps is changing very quickly on a daily basis it's still going to be you know a amount of time before enterprises can jump into that completely

5:39Tobie:yeah and it looked like one of the things that you you were kind of betting big on or building for was like more context and more memory and this isn't there's been like crazy hot like people are demanding more context they're demanding more memory is that something that's been really built

5:52Jaime:into the new release yeah context is important right and you see a lot of rag vector and that's a big big word it has been in the last year importantly again when you scale to large amounts of data it's not just about pattern matching or rag right or the semantic understanding you need to have that semantic understanding that's important you need to be able to do that as scale but you need to you need to match that or kind of bring that alongside graph and document and time series so if you look at again this comes back to are you building a very simple app that software's a service that you know good context is is one thing or are you building something that needs to understand relationships and have an understanding of kind of agent memory or have the ability to go back in time to see how data has changed over time the moment you get those kind of multi-dimensional aspects to your data it becomes more complex and that is where we're seeing a lot of people turn towards real db because yes you can do that with four or five different databases you can get time series you can get a document you can get a relational you can get a vector search and you can get a full-text search and a graph but to be able to do that in a single place where you offer you know you kind of make one query and it gives you back the results that you want and you can do that over 30 or 50 nodes that's that's a game changer for the large

7:01Tobie:deployments that we're working with and i saw that you the fastest growing database of all time i think was it 2.2.3 million downloads i mean it's just like astronomical growth where are you seeing that come from like how is it it feels like it's spreading like wildfire but where is where are those new downloads users coming from community i mean that's always been our biggest thing when we first launched back in august 2022 in a beta um we spend a lot of time nurturing the community and i think that's really important as you grow you have to make sure that if you have open source database um because the hardest thing of open database is to commercialize that so to do that you have to get people on your side from the get-go with a great product obviously and making sure that they can come on the journey with you so for example you know when we first launched we had like 14 awesome discord ask us questions throughout the night you know in the us and we're like always applying to them because those people can turn out to be massive using future and that's what we've seen so for us it's always about the community first making sure we can nurture that because you know we've seen some of the biggest um use case for us and biggest clients come from one man teams at so what one one person trying the side project then bringing it to their organizations us flying over to you know germany or wherever we've been to and stuff and pitching to the entire 47 or 156 people uh engineering departments and then they've adopted them there and used it in their enterprise production so yeah nurture the community always that's been our biggest thing and making sure that everyone feels loved and supported

8:17Jaime:continuously and that's i think i was gonna say as well people people find surreal db or they hear about it for the first time and when they come to the you know i think the name the name says it all right they come to the project they don't quite believe it does what it says it can do and when they start using it this is when they start taking into the organizations in which they're working because they actually see that actually this can completely simplify what they're trying to do this can enable them to do things that they couldn't do before or they were struggling to do before and that is that then opens up the conversation for enterprise deployments or large

8:46Tobie:scale deployments yeah it's interesting because the community aspect was something i wanted to touch on because you know you've got your discord you've got your youtube channel with thousands of subscribers the sort of videos with like over a million views how big a part of like like how big a team is looking after that must be a huge part of the job of surreal to be is to nurture and educate and look after that community we probably have a team of three to five people who do that at the beginning it was myself and toby um but we've grown obviously um i think it's so important i mean right now we have a team kind of a growth team um we also have growth team and there's five in that growth team and they manage everything from our events youtube our support to the community um and that is crucial i mean if we make sure that we have really really good events as in they look great great content and great turnout and that's really important because um we've seen a lot of adoption from enterprises who come along to these events and realize the power of what it can do and that's when they're starting venting it so yeah team of team very small team right now, but growing.

9:42Jaime:To add to that, you know, we built SurrealDB in the very beginning because we'd used four or five different databases, you know, and we asked ourselves, can we build something which gives you this incredible developer experience that makes it simpler than having to spin up five platforms that makes it simpler for you to write your APIs, your applications. And so developer experience and how people actually come to SurrealDB can deploy it, can work with it, can build on top of it is really important to us. We want it to be simple. and that is that's kind of been an aim from the very beginning all the way through to today

10:12Tobie:and and i want to talk a bit a bit about the commercialization so it sounds that your strategies you know you get users hooked on it loving it as individuals and they take it to their company and then you kind of upsell to the whole company is that your primary go-to-market or do you have other methods other channels that you're using up until now we've been very fortunate in all the logos you see on our site likes of nvidia walmart verizon samsung tencent they've all been inbound uh they've all come to that we're using obviously uh in a certain way or they've run a POC, a pretty production. Obviously, as we grow, we need to go out there and expand our sales team.

10:44Tobie:But for now, it's all been inbound. And because our team isn't that large at the moment, the interest has been phenomenal and probably overwhelming. But also, we know that as we grow and expand, especially in the US, as we're building our sales teams, is that we have to sort of go out there and nurture those who potentially haven't heard about us, but for sure, we'll in due course. Amazing. And I saw that part of this raise is going to be about growing the team. Is that team going to be, you know, So I guess how's that split going to be? Is it product focus, go to market? How's that going to look?

11:12Jaime:I think predominantly what we're building and growing is the sales team. You know, up until now, we've had a very small sales team. As Jamie said, it's all been inbound and we've just been kind of nurturing that. But now it's, you know, we're still a young database, right? Don't get me wrong. We're only three going on just about four years old, which is nothing in the world of databases. And, you know, there are many, many people who haven't heard of us out there. And so it's about getting our word out more. It's about building that sales team, building that go-to-market team, building the customer success and support team as well.

11:43Jaime:Because, you know, it's one thing hearing about us and starting to build. But then when you're deploying an app for a FTSE 500 company in production, it's ensuring that that can deploy and run successfully for that business.

11:57Tobie:And you talk about scaling maybe in the US. Are you seeing a geographic distribution of the users who are using CyrilDB? Are there any insights there? Definitely. I mean, we know that, Seb, you are a big supporter of the European tech scene, and we are too obviously being a London-based tech company. A lot of our users are based in the US, but we have for sure seen a big trend in obviously defense side of it too in the European tech space for us and the European scene. So our main part of the market is the US. We have a lot of customers over there, probably about 70 % to 75 % over the US. But as you've noticed probably yourself, the European scene is definitely growing very quickly, both in technology, but also government and defense too.

12:35Tobie:looking for kind of a sovereign tech database but also sovereign other stuff too so yeah and could you see either one of yourselves moving out to the u.s to sort of like spearhead the

12:43Jaime:expansion there yeah it's a good question and one thing what you know a question we always ask ourselves i think it goes without saying we're traveling over there a lot you know between new york and sf and our team is based kind of dotted around from west coast to central to east coast as well so you know that's something we always want to be we always wanted to build a business that was headquartered here. I don't think, you know, there's some great tech talent in Europe. And yet, you know, the market moves quicker. The choice to buy definitely moves quicker in the US than it does over here. But it was always going to be a business that, you know, the tech was, the tech talent was where we could find it and, you know, headquartered in London.

13:21Jaime:And then go to market was always going to be focused on the US.

13:24Tobie:I think we spend about half a month, every single month over in the US. We're actually there this week in the Bay and obviously New York the week after for a basically partnership and events. My wife is a country lover. She loves the country. The English countryside too. So getting her to move with the children, tricky one. But yeah, we spend a lot of time over there and I don't sleep. So, you know, get as much as we can on the flight as well. Yes. I mean, every founder I speak has a similar thing. It's that there's some attachment to London and Europe, but the pull from the US is just so strong and the procurement processes are so much quicker.

13:54Tobie:The risk appetite is so different. So, yeah, you just got to go where the money goes, I guess. 100 i mean we found on the c-run right i mean you know we took our c-run was entirely taken by first market matt turk and we had a lot of offers and a lot of interest um for us they just move very quick and they move uh they move in yeah very differently but also the appetite over there is like i said they love risk and they love moving quickly and how is it to adopt deploy kind of on board with serial db if you've got a large enterprise that wants to move over to serial db what's that process like and what role do you play in that yeah it's a good question and it can

14:27Jaime:it can depend on the in the organization a lot of people come to us and they say look we've done the poc we tested it we're going ahead with surreal db what can you offer in terms of the enterprise support the enterprise features the enterprise licensing um other people it's kind of the first time they've heard about surreal db or you know if we've gone out to them so that's a that's a different conversation i think ultimately you know surreal db is one of those databases which is designed to be distributed and highly scalable and so you know there aren't many of those databases out there most of them are based around postgres or or my sequel protocol so um really it's about the operations teams at these businesses being able to have the guarantees in terms of being able to deploy being able to scale being able to manage those the platforms especially there's one thing being in a small project it's another thing if you're in multiple projects around the organization so it's always been the focus of ours to build a simple database that can scale and as we work with these teams you know it's anything from improve it's not just about getting started on CeruleDB, right?

15:24Jaime:We want people to get the most out of CeruleDB. You can do some incredible things with the query language. It's very expressive. You can start with graph. You can then very quickly move to graph and time series and file storage. So it's also, you know, one thing, having a client start using CeruleDB and then another, having a client really get the most benefit out of CeruleQL that you can get in order to improve your AI agent or improve your performance or analyze more data and do that simply with less cost in the infrastructure and less cost in the application development.

15:54Tobie:I think as well, from an enterprise point of view as well, the biggest question we get asked is, are we here to stay? What's your funding like? Because for a database, it's such an important part of their tech stack. For me, it's the most important part. And therefore, if they're going to put petabytes of data onto a database and then you're not here in a few months' time, then it's not going to happen. So for us, obviously, this funding round is really beneficial to that, obviously, process of bringing them on board because they always ask us, you know, It's funny, like, how are you going to stay before we go and do this, you know, full import of all our data?

16:27Tobie:So for RCA, it's been a beneficial add to this. Amazing. And looking forward to, I guess it would be the B round. What do you need to achieve to get you there?

16:37Jaime:It's a good question, isn't it? I mean, it depends on the enterprise customers, the revenue, the growth, the speed of growth. I think, you know, there are many different platforms out there. a lot of new database platforms that have come up in the last couple of years. I think what's most interesting for CeruleDB is the proof points around handling large-scale deployments in enterprise and large organizations. And so for us, that's just what we're focusing on. I don't think we have an exact number that we have in mind that we've got to get to, but it's about proving that significant enterprise deployments can run and do run and are running on CeruleDB.

17:19Jaime:and at the same time having a great developer base and a fan base who want to build on SurrealDB from a bottoms up, from an indie hacker, from a small business point of view as well. And then, you know, and then it's not just that, it's having those businesses love what they're building on, you know, not just, oh, you know, we want to SurrealDB, it's all right. We want people to love building on SurrealDB and to want to continue building on SurrealDB and expand that use across the organizations in which they work.

17:44Tobie:And how close is that relationship with your end users like i know that you do so much stuff outward to train and educate and to like bring them up to speed how much do you get back from that community that helps you maybe like define

17:55Jaime:your product roadmap and build the next thing it's a really good question i think i think we've been very very well we've tried to be very very open in terms of communicating and being in constant contact with that with that community from day one you know i i do a monthly or bi-weekly sometimes Discord AMA where I talk for an hour any question on the database on potential features if we're trying to keep something a little bit hush hush before we release it then we can't always talk about it but as much as possible we talk about the way we built something the reason why, questions from the community and what we might be building next and on our Discord there are, as Jamie said, there are 16 year olds and 18 year olds building their first app and there are senior decision makers at massive enterprises who are already starting to build or making decisions about CeruleeB.

18:44Jaime:So we always want to be open with our community about that. And I think that's really important. It's the same thing with our streams and with our YouTube videos and with our Discord. It's just, I think that is the best way of learning of what people want from your product and also giving back the community who are building, let's put it this way, CeruleeB is a database, but a new type of database. We're trying to do something which no one really has done before, which is bring multiple models together and you know there is an element of jumping in the deep end of sorority b because you know if you want to make the most of it there's lots of different components that you can use and you know yes yeah we've also got a great ambassador program

19:24Tobie:uh with great ambassadors on that which really help us out and give us feedback too but also as toby said right we message people all the time i mean i got blocked on our own discord to send too many dms of christmas times all my uses from half one of you we want to make sure that look we don't know it all i mean also we want to you know we have ideas where we want to go but sometimes i might be wrong so having guidance and getting feedback from people who know things should be done in some way is so important because if you think you know it all you definitely don't and therefore getting people who are using it day in day out and giving their feedback to us is the most important part i mean that's proper founder mode isn't it when you get you get blocked for being too too i was doing that on christmas day i shouldn't have done it i know it's bad but i was messy everyone dm stuff i wish them to have you know and merry christmas and how they finally experience stuff and got blocked wife was shouting at me to get off it on the dinner table but hey look it's you got to right they found it right found it that's the life that's the life you live look one final question you know in six weeks six months a year how will you know that this release

20:17Jaime:has been a success uh it's a good question um i mean i think you can see pretty quickly that something's been a success right you know we've had some incredible comments when we announced it just this week about you know something's coming next week uh you've already had some amazing comments about people waiting for this release you know it's been it's been a while coming it's been a lot of work for the team but i think you know you can see pretty quickly i think also it goes about saying you know the more that we are being used as that uh integral infrastructure piece in ai applications and ai agent deployments then you're you're kind of proving out but i think you know it depends also on the organization right you know there's one thing which is being deployed in lots and lots of different ai agents and there's another thing being deployed in a multi petabyte deployment for you know government or financial services and that they both have different proof points so uh for us you know we can see pretty quickly uh what people think about the product and how people are using it um and yeah time will time will tell how that goes

21:20Tobie:amazing well look best of luck toby jamie thank you so much for joining me best of luck was there and congrats on the amazing news you guys are absolutely crushing it and uh i look forward to seeing you guys go from strength to strength appreciate man you know i've just seen myself the camera toby's seat is on the lowest setting i'm on the highest setting i'm still swore you're six eight i thought i got it right but i'm like five ten seven i thought that we set out properly but i'm not an absolute idiot yeah it's all good it's all good man hey as always man thanks much thank you very much keep crushing all right you too