Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
Realm, a Danish startup that has created an innovative mobile database, has received an investment round of $20 million led by Khosla Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.
Realm, formerly known as TightDB, has created a unique mobile database that runs many times faster than their competitors’ solutions. The database takes up so little space, which makes it perfect for mobile devices. According to Realm’s own numbers, is the database already running in more than 100 million units, with huge clients such as Buzzfeed, Intuit, Zynga and Coinbase.
The realm database is so small, that it is less than 1MB big! It is a replacement for Core Data and SQLite, and can save thousands of lines of code as well as enables developers to create awesome user experiences. It is possible to add the database to any app, with just a few lines of code.
Playing with the big boys
In order to accelerate their business, Alexander Stigsen and Bjarne Christiansen, the two founders of Realm, sought to accelerate their business back in 2011. They chose to look into Y Combinator, the famous startup incubator located in San Francisco.
Realm became part of the famous Y Combinator’s 2011 batch, together with for instance Parse, Firebase and Rap Genius. Y Combinator is known for having propelled superstars such as Airbnb, Dropbox and Twitch to the highest skies.
One of the famous things about Y Combinator is the so-called “Tueday Dinners”, in which the entire batch gather to learn from each other and the known speakers attending. Here the founder of Realm got the opportunity to meet Mark Zuckerberg, the iconic founder and CEO of Facebook.
“We are asked to sit down next to Mark, where we began to explain our product and business model. He was very impressed and interrupted us to ask what our secret is. The great thing about the program at Y Combinator is the really heavy influences that you can get in touch with,” explained Bjarne Christensen, Co-Founder of Realm.
After their meeting with Mark Zuckerberg, Realm was introduced to many leading figures in Facebook as well as the other large companies in San Francisco. Here Realm’s software was thoroughly tested, and the experts were very impressed over the results that Realm could produce.
$30 million in total investments
After this kind of recognition, from some of the biggest players in the industry, it did not take long before Venture Capitals begun to show interest in them. Khosla Ventures went together with Y Combinator and invested $7 million in Realm back in 2013.
“In the wake of the 3-month Incubator program, we received investments from various American VC’s, which helped us towards a successful launch,” said Bjarne Christensen.
The new $20 million investment round, also comes from Khosla together with Scale Venture Partners, which brings Realm’s investment total up to $30 million. In addition to the investment, Andy Vitus of Scale Venture Partners and David Helgason, founder of Unity, will join Realm’s board of directors.
Realm’s database is already the 2nd-most-deployed database in the world, and the founders are looking to expand their team and conquer new markets. The San Francisco based startup currently has 21 employees, and they are looking to double that number by the end of the year.
