Sunstone and DFJ Esprit back Crate Data

The fresh capital will be used to continue developing the company's core product and to expand the team in order to accelerate development on client integration. The funds will also be used to enhance Crate's developer community.

Crate chose to work with Sunstone and DFJ out of a pool of other potential backers because of their expertise in open-source companies, databases and data stores, according to Crate co-founder Christian Lutz.

This is DFJ's second growth capital investment of April 2014 – the firm also took part in a £6m funding round for Aveillant, a UK specialist in 3D surveillance radar systems.

Company
Founded in 2013 by Jodok Batlogg, former chief technology officer at German social network Studi VZ, Crate Data is headquartered in Dornbirn, with an office in Berlin. The company employs ten people in research and development.

The data store integrates distributed searches into the core of its database and allows developers to store tabular data, unstructured records and binary objects while enabling full-text search.

The distributed system runs on one machine or a cluster of machines and comes in one complete install package. It includes open-source components and extends those with added core functionalities. The data store is open-source, but Crate also offers an enterprise version that is priced by cluster and not by node.

People
Jodok Batlogg is CEO of Crate Data and co-founded the company with Christian Lutz and Bernd Dorn. Nikolaj Nyhom is a partner at Sunstone. Gil Dibner is a partner at DFJ Esprit. Both will take seats on Crate's board of directors.

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• Topics
• DACH
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Austria
• DFJ Esprit
• Sunstone Capital A/S