PlanetScale

PlanetScale, founded by co-creators of the Vitess open source project Jiten Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane, offers a serverless database infrastructure management platform. The company aims to reduce database fragility, development time-to-market, and downtime, by offering database imports (to move existing MySQL databases) and branching, sharding, and non-blocking schema changes. The platform is built on top of renowned open-source databases Vitess and MySQL. In March 2022, PlanetScale introduced a feature named “PlanetScale Rewind” to enable users to undo schema migrations and recover from changes that break production databases without losing any of the data that was added, modified, or otherwise changed in the interim.  In August 2022, the company went on to add a solution that enables its database to be more easily accessible from serverless edge locations. It later introduced a feature to accelerate these data queries via an integrated form of data caching in November of that same year.

The company follows a freemium model and has plans starting from USD 29 per month (per database), with charges varying based on factors such as storage, connections, and support offered. 

Key customers and partnerships

PlanetScale announced the general availability of its platform in November 2021 (after launching in private beta in May 2021) at which point it was being used by several large enterprises such as YouTube, GitHub, Slack, Square, and Affirm. Furthermore, its employee base had tripled over the six months to November 2021. 

Funding and financials 

PlanetScale raised USD 50 million in Series C funding in November 2021, led by Kleiner Perkins, just five months after raising USD 30 million in Series B funding. The newly raised funds were earmarked for accelerating R&D and expanding its go-to-market activities across the globe.