Tesora Takes In $4.5M to Advance Database as a Service

A local tech startup has some new money to push its vision of making database-as-a-service useful for enterprise customers.

Cambridge, MA-based Tesora, formerly known as ParElastic, says it has raised $4.5 million from new investor Rho Canada Ventures and previous investors, including General Catalyst, CommonAngels Ventures, and Point Judith Capital. The company now has raised $13.2 million to date.

In early 2014, the company pivoted from trying to extend the capabilities of existing databases, making them more “elastic” and flexible, to developing and supporting OpenStack Trove, a system for managing database capacity in an on-demand way. It also changed its name from ParElastic to Tesora (which means “treasure” in Italian.)

At around the same time, another Boston-area database-as-a-service startup, Cloudant, was acquired by IBM. The field of database-as-a-service has been growing in recent years, fueled by the challenges of administering multiple databases in the cloud, as well as interest from big players like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.

Tesora is led by co-founders Ken Rugg and Amrith Kumar, who are veterans of Progress Software and Netezza.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.