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PlanetScale is a company developing a MySQL-compatible serverless database service. Based in San Francisco, the company was founded by the team behind Vitesse, an open-source MySQL-compatible, cloud-native database used by some of the largest sites on the Internet. PlanetScale's products are powered by the Vitess technology.
The company's flagship product (also called PlanetScale) offers a range of features:
- Non-blocking schema changes to prevent table locking or downtime and
- Branching workflow that enables non-blocking schema changes by creating isolated copies of the database
Diagram showing the PlanetScale's branching workflows.
- Reverting recently deployed schema changes without losing data
- Horizontal scaling via sharding with minimal application changes, allowing users to break up a monolithic database and partition the data across several databases
- An in-dashboard query performance analytics tool for tracking performance down to the individual query level, called Insights
The company is developing additional products and functionality, including PlanetScale Boost for faster queries and vector search and storage for AI/ML applications.
Vitess is an open-source database technology invented at YouTube in 2010 to solve scaling issues with the company's massive MySQL database. Vitess was invented and open-sourced by Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, who in the years since received requests from tech companies looking to build the infrastructure needed to integrate the technology. Vitess can be challenging to implement and maintain without a large team. PlanetScale was founded in 2018 by Vaidya and Sougoumarane to make Vitess more accessible, making it easier for organizations to build multi-cloud databases for handling enormous amounts of data.
The new company raised $3 million in seed funding in April 2018, led by SignalFire and a number of angel investors including YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, Quora CEO and former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo, former Dropbox CTO Aditya Agarwal, PayPal and Affirm cofounder Max Levchin, MuleSoft cofounder Ross Mason, Google director of engineering Parisa Tabriz and Facebook’s first female engineer and South Park Commons founder Ruchi Sanghvi.
The company came out of stealth on December 13, 2018. In May 2019, the company announced a $22 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The round also included participation from existing investor SignalFire. As part of the round, Andreessen general partner Peter Levine joined the PlanetScale board. In June 2021, Planetscale launched its new hosted database platform (also called PlanetScale). Before the launch, the company offered a hosted version of Vitess. A couple of weeks later on June 23, 2021, PlanetScale announced a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners, with participation from a16z and SignalFire.
In July 2021, Sam Lambert (previously the VP of Engineering at GitHub) took over as CEO from cofounder Vaidya, who moved to a chief strategy role. Lambert joined the company nine months earlier as PlanetScale’s chief product officer. On November 16, 2021, PlanetScale made its hosted enterprise platform generally available and announced $50 million in Series C funding led by Kleiner Perkins. Existing investors a16z, SignalFire and Insight Partners also participated alongside GitHub’s former CEO and cofounder Tom Preston-Werner, Lattice CEO and founder Jack Altman and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen. The funding brought the company's total raised to $105 million. The company's platform was in private beta from May 2021. Early customers included YouTube, GitHub, New Relic, Slack, MyFitnessPal, Square and Affirm. At the GA and Series C announcement, CEO Lambert stated PlanetScale had tripled its employees in the previous six months.
On November 15, 2022, the company introduced PlanetScale Boost, a new product for faster querying. On October 3, 2023, PlanetScale announced it was bringing vectors to MySQL, with a private beta enabling vector search and storage for use with AI/ML applications. Users can access the beta by signing up on PlanetScale's website. On November 8, 2023, PlanetScale was named on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, ranking as the 188th fastest-growing company.
