Citus Data Inc. has seized the growing investor interest in databases sparked by its peers over on the non-relational end of the competitive spectrum to secure a $9.5 million investment that will go towards promoting its commercial flavor of PostgreSQL. It’s a breath of fresh air in a segment that hasn’t seen many early-stage funding rounds as of late.

PostgreSQL traces its roots back more than 30 years to a research project at UC Berkeley and has been under almost continuous development ever since. About a decade into the effort, the project’s supporters decided to replace their homegrown query syntax with SQL, and the rest is history.

The database is now one of the most popular open-source relational systems around, thanks in large part to the amount of features that contributors have added to its implementation of the language over the years. That functionality includes advanced operators that can simplify analytic workloads a great deal and are not available in MySQL, its biggest rival, but scalability issues have prevented adopters from taking advantage of those capabilities for their production workloads.

That’s the adoption barrier Citus hopes to elevate with its distribution, which can accommodate hundreds of billions of data points at any given and offers a number of value-added features on top of that like automated recovery. When a server in the process of executing a query fails, the system simply reassigns the request to a different node that automatically picks up where its malfunctioning peer left off.

That value proposition has earned Citus several notable users including CloudFlare Inc. and Mark Cuban-backed sales automation startup MixRank Inc., a clientele that the new funding is meant to help grow. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and included contributions from existing backers Data Collective and Vaizra Investments, bringing the startup’s total raised to a respectable $14 million.

Image via Jeralt