Agentic AI database startup PhoenixAI has raised $80M in Series B funding to accelerate software development and market expansion.Rebranded from CelerData last month, the 2022-founded company builds high-performance unified real-time analytics software based on open-source StarRocks. Its three founders launched the StarRocks project in 2020, delivering fast SQL queries, streaming ingestion and sub-second large-scale analytics. Over 300 global enterprises including Airbnb, Tencent, Didi and JD.com adopt StarRocks, with thousands of production nodes deployed worldwide.
Rick Underwood, ex-CEO of Commvault-acquired Clumio, joined as President in January to lead go-to-market and operations. He states agentic AI has moved rapidly from prototyping to mission-critical production for customer service, supply chain and internal workflow scenarios.
AI agents generate massive unplanned real-time queries across live, historical and multi-system data, overwhelming legacy data infrastructures. PhoenixAI solves this pain point by supporting scalable agent workloads with enterprise-grade governance meeting C-suite standards.Previously, CelerData offered StarRocks-based on-prem and cloud lakehouse analytics solutions. The company has refocused its platform to adapt to AI agent workloads, which reshape traditional data warehouse and lakehouse query paradigms.
AI agents produce dynamic, unpredictable queries unlike human users, which traditional pre-modeled, rigid data stacks cannot support. They require real-time joins of live and historical data at scale, a capability legacy databases lack.
PhoenixAI’s platform centers on speed, simplicity and governance. It provides sub-second latency and high concurrency for live data, unifies real-time and historical analytics to eliminate redundant pipelines and cut TCO, and delivers robust governance via sovereignty controls, RBAC, SOC 2 compliance and full encryption. It supports BYOC cloud and self-hosted PhoenixAI Anywhere deployment.Its exclusive Claude Custom Connector enables PhoenixAI Cloud users to query data via plain English and stream results directly in Claude chat interfaces.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, PhoenixAI serves production enterprise clients including AppLovin, Coinbase, Conductor and Demandbase, all long-term StarRocks users.Coinbase engineer Xinyu Liu notes the platform makes Kafka streaming data queryable within seconds, delivering sub-second live data responses and unifying real-time datasets for internal AI agents to expand data team capabilities.
Demandbase engineering manager Ryan Nowacoski adds PhoenixAI provides fast, isolated agent workload warehouses on Apache Iceberg tables with automatic intelligent join optimization for new data queries.The Series B round is led by Sky9 Capital, with participation from Atypical Ventures, Olive Technology Ventures and existing investors. A global AI and deep-tech VC, Sky9 operates across the U.S. and Asia. The new funding confirms a prior undisclosed Series A round.
Underwood posted on LinkedIn that PhoenixAI, the developer of Linux Foundation StarRocks, is building the next-generation agentic AI database. Future enterprise AI agents demand sub-second, highly concurrent and open database infrastructure, which defines PhoenixAI’s core strengths.
Drawing a parallel with Snowflake’s transformative growth in 2017, Underwood oversees all commercial and operational functions, while the founding team drives core technological innovation for the firm’s agentic AI database ecosystem.
Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
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