An Alexandria startup founded by well-known entrepreneur Phillip Merrick has raised $10 million to scale its platform that helps websites and applications run faster and more efficiently.
The close of this seed round for pgEdge, founded in 2022 by Merrick and Chief Technology Officer Denis Lussier, brings the company's total outside investment to $19 million to date.
Menlo Park, California-based investment firm Rally Ventures led the funding round, and partner Ben Fried, the former chief information officer at Google LLC, has joined pgEdge's board. Local investors Sands Capital Ventures and Grotech Ventures also backed the company with repeat investments.
The company's open-source platform is able to copy the databases that websites or applications use and distribute them across networks spanning geographic jurisdictions. This allows for websites or applications to run faster across the globe as opposed to relying on one or only a few database access points.
In an interview, Merrick said the capital will be used to ramp up pgEdge's sales and marketing teams in addition to scaling out its product capabilities. He anticipates the 26-person company to double its workforce over the next two years.
"We expect that this capital is going to support our growth for the next few years," Merrick said. "We're expecting that we'll be doing future fundraising further down the path."
Target customers for pgEdge's platform are large enterprises with websites or applications that need to be on and available across vast distances with limited delay, or low latency. That's a challenge that becomes harder to address the greater the physical distance there is between databases.
With its "fully distributed" approach, pgEdge, a 2023 Fire Award honoree from DC Inno, is able to reduce latency by making multiple replicated copies of the databases that power these websites or applications across a global network all while keeping the critical information these databases maintain in sync.
It's a beneficial solution for companies like a large investment firm in the U.K. that needs to maintain a trading platform in London and Hong Kong or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that operates applications across multiple data centers. Other customers include Berkeley, California-based mining company Kobold Metals and the European Parliament. Merrick declined to share specific sales figures.
Merrick has headed several companies before launching pgEdge. The software company he co-founded in 1995, webMethods, went on to reach $200 million in annual revenue before being acquired by SoftwareAG for $546 million in 2007. He also led Frederick-based cloud security company Fugue as CEO until Boston-based Snyk acquired it for more than $100 million in 2022. Prior to that, he served as the top executive for SparkPost, an email delivery company based in Columbia that was acquired by MessageBird for $600 million in 2021.
He said he believes pgEdge has the potential to be more successful than all of his prior ventures.
"Every application in the world uses a database, and a lot of those databases need to be distributed because of the demands that we all have on the applications we use every day," Merrick said. "If you think about it, we all have much greater expectations for the applications and technology that we use, we want it to never be unavailable, we want it to be super responsive, and to make that happen, the world needs more distributed databases."
