Alibaba has been trying to grow its cloud computing business this year, and the Chinese e-commerce giant is now poised to make a major investment in a Western startup in the sector, following plans to locate a second data center in Europe.
Alibaba has agreed to lead a 22.9 million euro ($27 million) financing round for European startup MariaDB, according to people familiar with the matter. The deal has not yet been completed but is expected to be soon after approval by MariaDB shareholders this week.
MariaDB develops one of the most popular open source database servers on the Internet today and is best known for a product that can replace MySQL servers. The product has 12 million users worldwide.
Alibaba will invest about 20 million euros, with the rest coming from existing shareholders. The deal values MariaDB at 300 million euros ($354 million). The valuation represents a significant increase from the $200m – $250m MariaDB received when it closed a €25m fundraising in May. Alibaba’s eagerness to close the deal left MaridDB almost free to bid, according to people familiar with the matter.
Yu Feng, general head of Alibaba Cloud database, will join the company’s board of directors.
Alibaba’s cloud computing business is growing rapidly, even Posting triple-digit revenue growth over the past year and topping 1m customers this year. (Compilation/Wingfly)