TigerBeetle is building database software optimized for financial transactions
After doing some consulting for Microsoft to develop protections against zero-day exploits, software engineer Joran Dirk Greef worked with Coil, a web monetization startup in San Francisco, to help build its payments infrastructure. At the time, Coil was using a traditional database to store and process transactions. But Greef had the insight that a specialized database could prove to be much more nimble -- and powerful.
The idea morphed into a skunkworks project at Coil, and Greef became a staff engineer working full-time on a new database design called TigerBeetle. Two years into the project, after customers started requesting enterprise support for the database, Greef spun out TigerBeetle as a startup.
TigerBeetle's open source database is engineered for financial online transaction processing, Greef says, capable of handling more than 8,000 debit and credit card transactions in a single query. One query for 8,000 transactions might not sound like a lot. But most general-purpose databases would require 1 to 10 queries per transaction. And more queries translates to more latency – especially if the database is hosted on a remote server somewhere.
"TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database that provides debit/credit primitives out of the box and enforces financial consistency in the database without requiring a developer to cobble together a system of record from scratch," Greef said.
"TigerBeetle is ideal for use cases where you need to count anything of value -- not necessarily money, but including money -- moving from one person or place to another," Greef said. A common application is an internal ledger for a company like Transferwise, he added, which has to keep track of lots of money moving between accounts.
Spinning out TigerBeetle was a wise decision in hindsight. TigerBeetle recently closed a $24 million Series A round led by Spark Capital's Natalie Vais with participation from Amplify Partners and Coil, bringing its total raised to more than $30 million. A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that TigerBeetle is valued at around $100 million post-money.
"We had planned to raise later in the year," Greef said. "However, after a surge in community growth at the beginning of 2024, and growing commercial interest, we decided to bring the raise forward to invest in engineering, go-to-market and TigerBeetle's cloud platform, which is under development."
TigerBeetle, which only has eight employees at present, plans to double the size of its team by 2025, provides its database technology in the form of a managed service. Greef claims that TigerBeetle has had paying customers "since day one," and that the TigerBeetle community -- folks using or contributing to the open source release -- has grown over 200% year-over-year.
Vais told TechCrunch that TigerBeetle is one of the more exciting database projects that she's seen recently.
“TigerBeetle rethinks every component from the ground up to handle modern transactional workloads," she said. "In a world where everything is becoming more online and more transactional, there’s a huge opportunity for TigerBeetle to become a foundational piece of infrastructure for modern systems of record."
TigerBeetle's managed service is currently available by invitation only, and the database reached its first production release just in March. But Greef says that growth -- in particular acquiring new customers -- will be the focus for the foreseeable future.
"TigerBeetle’s use cases extend beyond fintech," he continued, "Think usage-based billing with real-time spend caps, gaming live ops and energy smart meters, as well as instant payments, core banking, brokering, inventory, shopping carts, trucking and shipping, warehousing, crowdfunding, voting and reservation systems."
