Cockroach Labs

Cockroach Labs, Inc. is a New York-headquartered private software company that develops CockroachDB, a source-available distributed SQL database management system. The relational layer is built on a distributed, transactional, consistent key-value store that is designed to survive a range of infrastructure failures, and it is wire-compatible with PostgreSQL so users can reuse drivers and tooling from the PostgreSQL ecosystem. A cluster consists of nodes that can be spread across failure domains such as data centres or public cloud regions, and can be scaled horizontally by adding nodes or vertically by adding resources to existing nodes. The system runs on bare metal, VMs, containers and Kubernetes, in private data centers and in public clouds.

The product is positioned for online transactional processing (OLTP) and application development rather than analytics, combining horizontal scalability associated with NoSQL systems with the transactional guarantees of traditional SQL databases. Marketed capabilities include survival of regional failures with automated failover and strong consistency, elimination of manual sharding, online upgrades and schema changes, and declarative data-domiciling policies that pin data to specific localities for regulatory compliance and latency reduction. The company also offers migration tooling (MOLT) for moving workloads onto the platform. Product editions described include CockroachDB Self-hosted, CockroachDB Dedicated (fully managed cloud) and CockroachDB Serverless.

The company positions CockroachDB for database and application modernization and for AI-driven workloads, publishing material on topics such as multi-tenant AI agents, DORA compliance, and Kubernetes operations. Named customers referenced across company materials include Comcast, eBay, Nubank, Norfolk Southern, Bose, Form3, Mythical Games, Devsisters, Starburst Data, AllSaints, Booking.com, Kaizen Gaming, SumUp, CoreWeave and Riskified.

Founding story

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by former Google employees Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell. Kimball and Mattis met at UC Berkeley in the 1990s and co-created the open-source graphics program GIMP before joining Google in 2002, where they worked on infrastructure including the Google File System team; Darnell was a member of the Google Reader team. All three used Google's Bigtable and Spanner and interacted with the Spanner team. In 2012 Kimball, Mattis and Brian McGinnis founded the photo-sharing app ViewFinder, where they encountered similar database limitations and where Kimball coined the "cockroach" name for a database made of symmetric, self-replicating nodes that would be nearly impossible to kill. After Block (then Square) acquired ViewFinder in 2013, Kimball and Darnell published an open-source design document for a globally distributed relational database with transaction support; VC interest followed and they incorporated Cockroach Labs in 2015, with Mattis leaving Square to join as a co-founder a few months later.

Business model

Cockroach Labs commercializes CockroachDB, which is offered under a source-available Business Source License that keeps community use free of charge but prohibits offering a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without purchasing a license. Commercial services are sold as self-hosted enterprise deployments and as managed cloud services (CockroachDB Dedicated and CockroachDB Serverless), the latter with a free tier and consumption-based pricing where usage beyond the free tier is charged for what is used.

Revenue comes from commercial licensing of the source-available database and from managed cloud services, including a fully managed dedicated offering and a serverless offering with a free tier and usage-based pricing that scales to zero.

Traction

As of the December 2021 Series F announcement, the company reported over 200 customers, tens of thousands of clusters deployed worldwide, tripled annual recurring revenue in the prior year, 500% cloud revenue growth in the prior quarter, more than 50% of customers running on CockroachDB Dedicated, over 10,000 new users on the CockroachDB Serverless beta, more than 22,000 GitHub stars, over 500 open-source contributors and 100% year-over-year headcount growth. Contrary Research listed 559 employees as of September 2023. Publicly referenced customers include Comcast, eBay, Nubank, Norfolk Southern, Bose, Form3, Mythical Games, Booking.com, SumUp, Kaizen Gaming, CoreWeave and Riskified.

Latest developments

Recent company publishing focuses on AI and agentic workloads (data isolation for multi-tenant AI agents, DORA compliance for AI agents, the agent-to-agent protocol data layer), Kubernetes-aware database operations, and PostgreSQL migration via MOLT. Wikipedia records a stable release of 25.1.4 on April 8, 2025. A third-party profile notes the recent appointment of Sailesh Munagala as CFO.