Tessell snags $60M to drive data management at scale

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Tessell , a startup developing a multi-cloud database-as-a-service, has raised $60 million in a new funding round led by WestBridge Capital ahead of its plans to expand its market presence and launch an AI-powered conversational database management service. As data becomes more critical than ever, many companies are struggling to manage and store it efficiently. Legacy database solutions are often rigid, offering little flexibility across cloud providers. Meanwhile, most managed database services remain costly, commanding high rates for high performance. Tessell aims to solve all this with its platform. The four-year-old startup leverages decades of database kernel experience from its co-founders to offer enhanced operational database management, taking on existing relational database services, including Amazon’s RDS. “Tessell is a tessellation of enterprise data,” said co-founder and CEO Bala Kuchibhotla in an exclusive interview. Kuchibhotla started Tessell after spending over a decade at Oracle and four years at Nutanix. He saw an opportunity to “reimagine” operational data management after looking at the problems companies face with existing database management services. Tessell claims to deliver 10x the performance of existing database management services with a 64-73% savings within a three-year total cost of ownership thanks to its NVMe infrastructure. The technology does away with the industry-standard input-output operations per second (IOPS) metering and provides high IOPS and low latency, along with price predictability. Tessell also offers zero downtime on migrations and works to ensure databases stay up and running even if one cloud service goes down. Tessell is compatible with all four major cloud service providers: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. It also supports leading database engines like MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB. “If you are an AI application, you can spin up [or] spin down the databases that you need on the Tessell infrastructure,” Kuchibhotla told TechCrunch, adding that Tessell supports both traditional databases with vector extensions and standalone vector databases. Tessell’s all-equity Series B round, which also had participation from B37 Ventures and Rocketship.vc as well as existing investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, will help Tessell develop its AI-powered conversational technology designed to further simplify data management. The San Ramon-based startup, which also has an office in Bengaluru, currently has a headcount of around 143 employees. It also has 40 customers, two-thirds of which are in India, including Moody’s, Aditya Birla Capital, Tata Capital, Jubilant Ingrevia, and Forbes. With the fresh funding, Tessell also plans to enter Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, enhance its go-to-market to scale up in the U.S. and India, and invest more in R&D to strengthen its services. In addition, the startup intends to look at analytics as its next possible line of business, enabling companies to funnel data from platforms such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, or Microsoft Fabric for analysis on Tessell.