What’s next for Cockroach Labs after $278M venture capital deal gives $5B valuation

The firm offers companies cloud-native databases. It said it adopted the cockroach moniker for its ability to scale up quickly and be difficult to kill. The startup is competing with giants such as Amazon and Oracle.

Crain’s spoke with co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball, a former Google and Square engineer, about the startup’s plans for the near future.

The next web

Kimball sees a big opportunity for the company as enthusiasm grows around new, reimagined forms of the web, such as the virtual realm of the metaverse and the blockchain-driven, decentralized Web3.

“We are built for the cloud and distributed, and that allows us to make very, very large databases—which is what all of these trends are relying on,” he said.

The next step for the company, he said, is adding talent to meet the growing demand from clients such as Bose, Comcast and eBay.

Labor crunch

In order to meet that demand, Cockroach is looking to scale its operations in research and development, engineering and sales. The company doubled its head count in the past year, to 300, but is now facing a tight labor market.

“We’ve been doing this for seven years now in New York, with Cockroach, and before that 17 years with Google and Square, so we’ve seen the evolution. I have never seen anything like the past six months,” Kimball said. “It is a good time to be someone in technical resources—an engineer, all of the associated roles.”

Cockroach is not the only startup out there with money to spend on talent. In New York City alone, startups raised $13 billion in venture capital from July through September, smashing previous local records for the third quarter.

“Everyone needs to translate that money into results,” Kimball said, “and you need people to do it.”

Pay is going up, and companies such as Cockroach are broadening their search. The company also has offices in San Francisco and Toronto, along with employee “clusters” in Denver, Seattle and London.

This year Crain’s ranked Cockroach Labs as the top company with more than 100 employees to work for in the city.