Big in Japan: Open Source NoSQL Company Basho Lands New $11.5 Million Round of Funding

Basho, the company behind the open source NoSQL database Riak and the proprietary cloud storage system Riak CS, today announced a $11.5 million Series F round of funding lead by Georgetown Partners. The majority, $6.1 million, of this round comes from a new investor: IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan (no relation to the analyst firm).

Basho was founded in 2008 and sells enterprise support for Riak, a distributed database based on principles described in Amazon.com’s Dynamo white paper and used by companies such as Comcast, Voxer and Disqus. In March of this year the company announced Riak CS, which is based on the Riak database and enables customers to build Amazon S3 compatible storage systems either on-premise or in the public cloud.

CEO Don Rippert says the funding will help support the company’s international expansion of the company as well as the expansion of its product line, which Rippert says will continue to expand. Basho has raised $39 million to date, according to Rippert.

Not only is IDC Frontiers an investor, but it’s also a customer of Basho’s database and storage products. IDC Frontiers offers hosting, colocation and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in Japan. Rippert believes this partnership will aid Basho’s expansion into the Asian market.

Basho competes with other NoSQL providers, such as DataStax, which offers support and tools for Apache Cassandra, another open source database based on Dynamo.