Technology pioneer Mike Stonebraker raises $8.5M to launch DBOS and radically transform cloud computing

Revolutionary cloud-native operating system is poised to disrupt cloud application development, making applications built using Typescript and other languages simpler to build, scale, and secure

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ --  DBOS, Inc., developer of the world's first cloud-native operating system, today announced that it has raised $8.5 million in Seed funding, and released its first product offering. The funding was led by Engine Ventures and Construct Capital, along with Sinewave, and GutBrain Ventures. Engine Ventures general partner, Reed Sturtevant, joins Andy Palmer, Michael Stonebraker, and Peter Kraft on the DBOS board. The company also announced the release of DBOS Cloud, a transactional serverless application development platform powered by DBOS, which makes cloud applications vastly easier to develop, deploy, and secure.

Co-founded by Turing Award laureate and Postgres creator, Mike Stonebraker, Databricks co-founder and CTO, Matei Zaharia, and a joint team of MIT and Stanford computer scientists, DBOS is on a mission to dramatically simplify the way cloud applications are built, deployed, and secured.

Based on years of joint MIT-Stanford research and development, the team's technological breakthrough is DBOS (database oriented operating system), which runs operating system services on top of a high-performance distributed database. The result is a scalable, fault-tolerant, and cyber-resilient foundation for cloud-native applications with the added ability to store all state, logs, and other system data in SQL-accessible tables.

"The cloud has outgrown 33 year-old Linux, and it's time for a new approach," said Mike Stonebraker. "If you run the OS on a distributed database as DBOS does, fault-tolerance, multi-node scaling, state management, observability and security get much easier. You don't need containers or orchestration layers, and you write less code because the OS is doing more for you."

Introducing DBOS Cloud - a transactional Functions as a Service (FaaS) platform

DBOS is initially available for developers to experience via DBOS Cloud, which launched today. DBOS Cloud is a transactional serverless application platform powered by the DBOS operating system, and it's used to build and run serverless functions, workflows, and applications.

Because it runs on DBOS, DBOS Cloud provides a unique experience that reduces the complexity of development, deployment, and operations, while increasing cybersecurity and cyber-resilience.

"With DBOS, developers can build applications in days that now take months on conventional cloud platforms," said Matei Zaharia, Chief Technologist and Co-Founder of Databricks, who is also a Co-Founder of DBOS. "Moreover, developers can seamlessly use the same tools they use today. So, there is very little learning curve to benefit from the rapid development, guaranteed transactions, and increased cybersecurity of DBOS."

DBOS Cloud is the only serverless computing platform to provide:

• Support for stateful functions and workflows
• Built-in fault tolerance with guaranteed once-and-only once execution
• Time-travel debugging
• SQL-accessible observability data
• Enablement of cyberattack self-detection and self-recovery

"The cybersecurity implications of DBOS are truly transformative," said DBOS co-founder and former Head of Cybersecurity Practice at BCG Platinion, Michael Coden. "By simplifying the cloud application stack, DBOS greatly reduces the attack surface of cloud applications. On top of that, DBOS enables self-detection of cyberattacks within seconds without the use of expensive external analytics tools, and it can restore itself to a pre-attack state in minutes. It's a DevSecOps game-changer."

The company will use the funds to grow the engineering team and continue to enhance the fully managed DBOS Cloud transactional computing platform and its components:

• Open source DBOS SDK currently for TypeScript
• DBOS Time Travel Debugger
• DBOS operating system

"Cloud applications have been running on decades-old operating systems, the equivalent of driving cars and trucks cross-country on dirt roads. DBOS provides a necessary and overdue overhaul, " said Reed Sturtevant, Engine Ventures general partner. "Engine Ventures feels privileged to invest in this world-class team with a product that can become the new foundation."

"At Construct, we understand the large leaps that modern operations must make to remain competitive and hit productivity gains for the decades to come, and DBOS hits right at the core of this, providing a new foundation for application development," said Dayna Grayson, Construct Capital co-founder & Managing Partner. "DBOS Cloud is simple and resilient by default creating the opportunity to create amazing new reliable applications. We are thrilled to be working with this deeply technical and accomplished team again at DBOS."

Additional Resources

For more information about DBOS, visit dbos.dev.

• Try DBOS Cloud for free
• Follow DBOS on LinkedIn
• Read the DBOS product documentation
• Join the DBOS Community on Discord

About DBOS, Inc.

Co-founded by world class computer scientists including Turing Award laureate and Postgres creator, Mike Stonebraker, Matei Zaharia, Phd, Christos Kozyrakis, Peter Kraft, PhD, Qian Li, PhD along with industry veterans Chuck Bear and former Head of Cybersecurity Practice at BCG Platinion, Michael Coden, DBOS is on a mission to make cloud applications more reliable and vastly easier to develop, deploy, and secure. Based on years of joint MIT-Stanford research and open source development, DBOS revolutionizes cloud technology by eliminating the need for containers and other infrastructure required to run cloud applications on the 30 plus-year old Linux operating system. As a result, DBOS-based cloud applications are drastically simpler to build, scale, and secure. DBOS is a remote-first company with headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Learn more at dbos.dev.

SOURCE DBOS