Crate.io Does a U-Turn: After Its U.S. Detour, It Is Now Based in Liechtenstein
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A decade in San Francisco, and now back to Alpine views: Crate.io, the database start-up originally founded in Dornbirn, Austria, has moved its headquarters from the United States back to Europe. The company and its open-source database, CrateDB, are now owned by Crate.io AG, a newly established holding company based in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, the company announced. The reason for the homecoming: European customers want to know who owns their database.
From Dornbirn to San Francisco and Back
Crate was founded in 2013 in Dornbirn by Christian Lutz, Bernd Dorn and Jodok Batlogg. In 2014, the start-up won the competition at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in London, and in 2016 it raised €3.6 million from investors including Dawn Capital, Speedinvest and the Docker founder Solomon Hykes. The same year, Crate moved its headquarters to San Francisco, while most of its development stayed in Vorarlberg. A $11 million Series A led by Zetta Ventures of San Francisco followed in 2018, and another $10 million round in 2021.
New Owners, While Old Investors Stay in the U.S.
Now the company is going the other way, through a sale. Crate.io AG has acquired all assets of the U.S. entity Crate.io Inc., the company told Trending Topics in response to an inquiry. That includes the Austrian subsidiary Crate.io AT GmbH, which holds the operating business and the intellectual property. Crate.io Inc. continues to exist, and so do its shareholders: Earlier investors such as Molten Ventures (formerly Draper Esprit), Zetta, Vito Ventures, Dawn Capital and Speedinvest still hold stakes in the Inc., according to the company, as do the founders Mr. Lutz, Mr. Batlogg and Mr. Dorn. Nothing has changed there, the company said. Crate.io did not mention any stake for them in the new AG, nor did it disclose a purchase price.
Who owns Crate.io AG remains unclear. The owners and investors are private investors who do not want to be named publicly, the company said. All of them, it added, support the mission of meeting customers’ data sovereignty requirements as a European company. The board is chaired by Alois Flatz, whose investment firm, Flatz & Partners AG, is also based in Vaduz and took part in a Crate funding round in 2021. Crate.io declined to disclose the size of the new funding. The company says it has 33 employees, 21 of them in Austria and Germany.
Sovereignty as a Selling Point
The chief executive, Robert Ekstrom, attributes the move to demand. For operators of critical infrastructure, regulated industries and the public sector, he said, data sovereignty has become decisive for purchasing. “Features and price alone are no longer enough. Who owns the technology and which law it is subject to is just as important,” Mr. Ekstrom said. European hosting alone is not enough, he added.
CrateDB is a distributed SQL database that combines time series, text and vectors in a single query. It is used mainly in the industrial internet of things, for example for live data from production lines, vehicle fleets and power grids. According to Crate.io, customers include the technology group ABB, the Vorarlberg beverage maker Rauch and the video technology company Bitmovin.
A Partnership With STACKIT
To go with the homecoming, Crate.io has entered a partnership with STACKIT, the cloud arm of Schwarz Group, which also owns Lidl and Kaufland. Customers can launch a cluster on STACKIT directly from CrateDB Cloud, on infrastructure that runs exclusively in European data centers. STACKIT is one of four providers the European Commission selected in the spring for its sovereign cloud. “Customers no longer have to choose between real-time performance and data sovereignty,” said Crate’s chief technology officer, Sebastian Utz.
Strong Competition From the U.S.
In the market for real-time and time-series databases, Crate.io faces big names, including InfluxData with InfluxDB and ClickHouse, both headquartered in the United States. That is exactly where Crate.io’s return comes in: For European customers who care that their database is subject to European law, CrateDB aims to become the obvious choice.
