MariaDB Raises $9 Million and Appoints Michael Howard New CEO and Monty Widenius as CTO

SAN FRANCISCO, CA and HELSINKI, FINLAND--(Marketwired - Jan 21, 2016) - MariaDB Corporation, a recognized leader in open-source relational database solutions for high availability, scalability, and performance, today announced that it has received $9 Million in equity financing to support accelerating sales and advanced technology development. The company also announced the appointment of Michael Howard as the company's chief executive officer, and Michael "Monty" Widenius as chief technology officer, effective January 1, 2016. Intel Capital and California Technology Ventures were among the investors in the $9 Million equity financing.

Howard brings decades of leadership in the enterprise software, data management, and big data industries. He is charged with scaling MariaDB to continue its steep growth and with steering the company's market-leading technology innovation in partnership with the MariaDB user community.

"Michael's proven leadership and deep operational and technology expertise will enable MariaDB to extend its position in the open source database market," said Scott Raskin, independent director on the MariaDB Board. "With his extensive experience driving growth at both private and public companies, we believe Michael's leadership will enable MariaDB to capitalize on the massive shifts and opportunities it is addressing in the data management space."

"The breadth of MariaDB's customer base and user community is strong validation that open, enterprise-grade products are the future of the database market," said Howard. "I am excited at the opportunity to work with the MariaDB team and our partners to create database products that lead the market in innovation and value."

Most recently, Howard was CEO at C9, which he transformed into one of the leading predictive analytics companies in the CRM space, ultimately leading to its acquisition by InsideSales. Previously, Howard was CMO at Greenplum (now Pivotal), the Big Data division of EMC. He was CEO at Ingrian Networks and Outerbay, and VP of the Internet Division at Veritas and of Data Warehousing at Oracle.

Monty Widenius, the creator of both MySQL and MariaDB, has joined the company as CTO. Monty has been advocating open source throughout the industry as well as serving on the boards of MariaDB Corporation and the MariaDB Foundation, the non-profit organization charged with promoting, protecting and advancing the MariaDB codebase, community, and ecosystem. Monty developed MySQL, the most widely adopted open source relational database, which was acquired by Oracle as part of the Sun Microsystems purchase in 2010. Monty remains Founder and Open Source Advocate at the MariaDB Foundation.

"MariaDB's success as an open source technology goes hand-in-hand with its growing popularity in the commercial market. As part of the MariaDB team, I will be able to create innovative data management capabilities more quickly, and ensure these are open and accessible to the global development community by continuing the close collaboration with the MariaDB Foundation," said Monty. 

About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB Corporation is a leader in open-source database solutions for SaaS, cloud, and on-premises applications that require high availability, scalability, and performance. Built by the founder and core engineering team behind MySQL, MariaDB is the "M" in LAMP, having displaced MySQL as the default database in the Red Hat and SUSE Linux distributions. MariaDB is also included in Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Rackspace and other cloud stacks, and it is the database of choice for IBM POWER8. MariaDB has over 9 million users in more than 45 countries, including global brands such as HP, Wikipedia, Virgin Mobile, and Booking.com. For more information, visit mariadb.com.