European Investment Bank tosses €25m to MariaDB

The European Investment Bank has decided MariaDB Corporation is worthy of €25 million funding under the European Commission’s Investment Plan for Europe.

The Plan is often referred to as the “Juncker Plan”, reflecting its status as a pet project of European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, who wants more investment in the single market.

The Corporation is the commercial entity tending MariaDB. There's also an open version of the database. MariaDB Corporation therefore gets not just some cash, but an expectation it will grow like topsy.

The Commission's canned statement quotes industry analysts IDC and Gartner to the effect that database sales are going to soar and open source databases are bound to take a big slice of that growth. With a fine example of just such a database, calling Helsinki home, it seems the Bank couldn't resist.

The funds are earmarked “to further product innovation for MariaDB’s expanding global enterprise client base and increase its sales and marketing teams in Europe, America, and Asia.” The company's Helsinki HQ is expected to hire engineers to do the innovation part. Sales people will need to be in-territory.

MariaDB has a fabulous pedigree because its CTO, Michael "Monty" Widenius, had the same role at MySQL before Sun slurped it in 2008. Differences of opinion on MySQL's future led Widenius to fork it and create MariaDB T in 2009.

Things have gone swimmingly since: MariaDB Corp claims 12 million users, plenty of them doing hard things at scale.

€25m isn't a colossal quantity of money by Silicon Valley standards. But MariaDB is already a living, breathing product. There's no reason the cash won't help MariaDB Corp to grow. Whether it will help Europe is another matter entirely. ®