PlanetScale offers a serverless, highly scalable transactional database platform built on the Vitess and MySQL ecosystems, positioning itself as a backend used by major sites. Its hosted enterprise platform moved from private beta to general availability, and customers already include YouTube, GitHub, New Relic, Slack, MyFitnessPal, Square and Affirm. The company has shipped innovative capabilities such as database branching and a new one‑click MySQL import feature, and it is integrated with the Prisma Data Platform. PlanetScale says it has only delivered about 10% of what Vitess can do and plans to add more database primitives and product work it deferred while building core features like login systems and audit logging. The team has grown rapidly — employee count tripled in the prior six months — and leadership changed with Sam Lambert becoming CEO while co‑founder Jiten Vaidya moved to chief strategy officer. Financially, PlanetScale has been capitalized through venture rounds, most recently a $50M Series C. PlanetScale provides a developer-first hosted database platform built on the open-source Vitess clustering system for MySQL, originally developed at YouTube. The company recently launched a new hosted database service, also named PlanetScale, that abstracts infrastructure concerns like cloud zones and cluster sizes. PlanetScale previously offered a hosted version of Vitess but says the new product focuses on ease of use, design, and the complete developer journey. The team added former GitHub VP of Engineering Sam Lambert as Chief Product Officer to help shape the product. Customers include Slack, Figma, GitHub and Square. PlanetScale plans to use new funding to scale its team globally and accelerate adoption of the platform, and has now raised a total of $55 million according to Crunchbase. PlanetScale commercializes Vitess, a horizontal sharding middleware originally used to scale YouTube, offering hosting, on-premise licensing, professional training, and paid support for the open-source project. Its core product enables live re-sharding of MySQL databases to maintain consistent latency and meet data-locality requirements such as GDPR. The company has 18 customers paying for licenses and services and a ~20-person team that it plans to double by hiring sales, marketing, and support. PlanetScale is preparing to release its own multi-cloud hosting to a general audience soon. Leadership says the business is growing well and the funding will be used largely to build go-to-market capabilities rather than engineering. The startup positions itself as both a complement and competitor to hosted database offerings from large cloud providers. PlanetScale commercializes Vitess, the horizontal sharding middleware for MySQL developed by its founders while at YouTube, to make multi-cloud relational databases easy to run without vendor lock-in. The company was founded by Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane and builds on Vitess’s battle-tested scalability, which powers YouTube and other large apps. PlanetScale offers four core products: professional Vitess training, on-demand support for open-source Vitess users, Vitess database-as-a-service on PlanetScale servers, and software licensing for on-premises or other cloud deployments. Its beta lets customers spin up Vitess clusters on PlanetScale, run licensed installs on their own infrastructure, or use AWS today with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure integrations coming soon, enabling multi-cloud masters and replicas. The platform supports on-the-fly re-sharding, GDPR-aware data relocation, migrations without major code changes, and Kubernetes-based operations, and the company commits to keeping its query tooling open source. PlanetScale quietly raised a $3 million seed round in April, and its early customers include Bukalapak while it is helping Booking.com, GitHub and New Relic migrate to Vitess as inbound demand ramps.

Total raised

$105M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Nov 2021