Cockroach Labs Accelerates Momentum into 2026 as Enterprises Rebuild for AI-Scale Resilience

Performance breakthroughs, global expansion, and agentic AI readiness fuel continued adoption of distributed SQL.

NEW YORK, Jan. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Cockroach Labs, the pioneer in cloud-agnostic distributed SQL databases with CockroachDB, closed 2025 with accelerating momentum as enterprises modernize their data infrastructure to withstand AI-driven scale, rising outage risk, and tightening regulatory expectations.

As AI agents push backend systems beyond human-scale workloads, resilience has become the defining requirement for mission-critical databases, positioning Cockroach Labs at the forefront of this transformation.

The Problem: Legacy Databases Were Not Built for Constant Disruption
Most traditional databases were designed for static environments with predictable failure modes. They struggle to scale elastically, recover automatically, or maintain consistency during infrastructure loss—limitations that become critical as AI-driven systems increase traffic volume, concurrency, and operational complexity.

This gap has forced enterprises to reconsider the foundations of their data infrastructure, particularly for workloads that must remain online, correct, and globally available under stress.

CockroachDB Delivers Performance and Resilience for AI at Scale
That urgency is reflected in market investment. Gartner estimates worldwide AI spending reached $1.5 trillion in 2025, with infrastructure being the single fastest growing line item.

In response, Cockroach Labs delivered one of its most ambitious years of product innovation to date. With the release of CockroachDB 25.2, the company introduced major performance improvements, boosting throughput by up to 50 percent while significantly reducing the impact of common failure scenarios. New capabilities such as leader leases, buffered writes, and WAL failover help CockroachDB maintain availability through disruptions that routinely impact traditional databases.

Cockroach Labs also expanded support for AI-native workloads with the introduction of PostgreSQL-compatible vector indexing through C-SPANN, designed to deliver low-latency search at scale without sacrificing resilience or operational simplicity. Additional advances in enterprise security, Kubernetes deployment, and database migration—including expanded support for Oracle migrations—further strengthened CockroachDB's readiness for mission-critical, regulated environments.

Business Momentum: Enterprise Adoption and Partner Expansion
As a result, Cockroach Labs delivered accelerated, durable growth as demand for resilient, globally distributed cloud infrastructure continued to rise. ARR delivered solid year-over-year growth, driven by strong enterprise customer growth and deeper adoption among existing customers. Traction increased among large, global organizations as well as high-velocity verticals, reinforcing Cockroach Labs' role as a trusted foundation for mission-critical, always-on applications.

Strategic partnerships played an increasingly important role in this momentum. Cockroach Labs expanded its partner ecosystem, including its OEM relationship with IBM, enabling enterprises to modernize legacy data platforms with distributed SQL built for resilience at scale. The company also strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of Sailesh Munagala as Chief Financial Officer to support continued growth.

Benchmarking for Reality: Performance under Adversity 
In 2025, Cockroach Labs also introduced Performance under Adversity, a new industry benchmark designed to measure how databases perform when things go wrong—not just when everything is working perfectly. Reimagining traditional benchmarks that assume steady-state conditions, Performance under Adversity evaluates performance across real-world failure scenarios such as network partitions, disk stalls, node restarts, and zonal outages. The benchmark reflects how modern systems actually operate in production and reinforces Cockroach Labs' commitment to transparency, rigor, and building infrastructure that remains performant under pressure.

As part of Performance under Adversity testing, CockroachDB demonstrated more than five times the resilience of Oracle's globally distributed database when subjected to real-world failure scenarios, sustaining performance and recovering faster under disruption. (NOTE: We tested CockroachDB v25.3 against Oracle GDD 23ai. 23ai is the first version of Oracle that can support GDD in a Raft configuration. The results are accurate as of September 2025.)

RoachFest Goes Global: Learning from Real-World Resilience
In 2025, Cockroach Labs took its annual database conference, RoachFest, global with events in London, Bengaluru, and Las Vegas. The conferences brought together customers, partners, and engineers from around the world to share real-world lessons on operating resilient, scalable data infrastructure under production conditions. Customer speakers from organizations including global payments providers, online marketplaces, and gaming platforms shared how they use CockroachDB to remain online through failure, scale rapidly, and meet regulatory and performance demands, highlighting the growing global community building around CockroachDB.

Looking Ahead: A Focus on Unyielding Scalability
In 2026, infrastructure resilience is rapidly becoming a board-level mandate. Agentic AI systems operate continuously and autonomously, placing unprecedented demands on backend platforms that must perform without human intervention.

"Agentic AI is changing the failure profile entirely," said Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. "As agentic workloads scale, databases that weren't designed to stay online through disruption will become the limiting factor. We built CockroachDB for a future where failure is assumed and resilience determines who can scale."

With AI investment accelerating and tolerance for downtime collapsing, Cockroach Labs enters the new year focused on enabling enterprises to scale confidently—without breaking under pressure.

To learn more about Cockroach Labs, visit https://www.cockroachlabs.com/product/overview/

About Cockroach Labs:
Cockroach Labs is a pioneering software company at the forefront of database technology, dedicated to delivering resilient and scalable database solutions to run mission-critical workloads for the world's most important businesses. The company's clients include Form3, Hard Rock Digital, and Shipt, Fortune 50 global financial institutions as well as retail and media industry leaders. With a mission to scale when others fail, Cockroach Labs is revolutionizing the way businesses manage their data with its innovative cloud native distributed SQL database, CockroachDB.

SOURCE Cockroach Labs, Inc.