ScyllaDB Inc., a database startup that boasts big-name users such as IBM Corp. and the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN, today announced that it has raised $10 million in funding to take on the industry’s top cloud providers.

Specifically, ScyllaDB plans to build a managed version of its database that will compete with similar services on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure. The startup is banking on its platform’s performance-centric feature set to provide a competitive edge.

ScyllaDB is an open-source NoSQL store derived from Apache Cassandra, a well-established database originally developed by Facebook Inc. to power its search tool. The startup rewrote the platform in a different programming language and made a number of major changes meant to improve performance. The result, according to ScyllaDB, is a database that can operate up to 10 times faster than Cassandra with consistently low latency.

The platform’s capabilities lend themselves to a wide range of use cases. ScyllaDB said some companies use its platform to process time series information, while others use the software as a graph store. The latter arrangement provides the ability to record the relationships between different data points, which can be helpful in areas such as social media analysis and cybersecurity.

ScyllaDB has been monetizing the database with a commercial version called ScyllaDB Enterprise. The offering augments the core open-source system with the kind of advanced management features that large organizations require, including the ability to automate certain day-to-day maintenance work.

Some of the features from ScyllaDB Enterprise will no doubt make their way to the new cloud service that the team is developing. But although the startup has seen strong adoption so far, with hundreds of organizations currently using its database in production, winning market share from the likes of AWS likely won’t be easy.

The new $10 million cash infusion shows that ScyllaDB’s investors are at least somewhat optimistic about its prospects. The round was led by TLV Partners with participation from several returning backers, most notably the venture capital arms of Qualcomm Inc. and data storage giant Western Digital Corp.

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