SkySQL has announced that it has secured $20 million in Series B investment from Intel Capital, California Technology Ventures, Finnish Industry Investment, Open Ocean Capital and Spintop Private Partners.

The funding will be used to invest in the MariaDB open source project, to better support the company’s growing community and user base worldwide, and to develop commercial solutions for scaling the MariaDB database server.

The announcement follows SkySQL’s merger with Monty Program, who are behind MariaDB, in April 2013 that reunited the key members of the original MySQL AB team.

Industry analysts 451 Group pin MariaDB’s increasing market share to it becoming the favoured SQL technology in popular Linux distributions such as OpenSUSE and Fedora.

"Adoption of the MariaDB database server has grown explosively in the last year," said Patrik Sallner, SkySQL CEO. "With the help of our loyal user base, we have built up significant market share when compared to other open source database technologies.

"We have raised this latest round of investment to enhance MariaDB’s position as the world’s fastest growing open source relational database and to continue to foster a vibrant community around the project.

"For largescale internet players like Google and Wikipedia, MariaDB database server delivers clear benefits over existing relational databases. With this funding we plan to deliver commercial solutions that make it even easier for enterprises of any size to run MariaDB databases at scale."

Marcos Battisti, MD for Intel Capital in Western Europe and Israel said: "The combination of SkySQL’s solutions with MariaDB’s advanced features and large open source community is a compelling offering for enterprises. We are excited to amplify SkySQL’s growth through Intel Capital’s significant resources, expertise and broad enterprise ecosystem."

"The database software market has gone through tremendous change in the last several years, driven by the increasing variety, velocity and volume of data, by the elasticity and scalability offered from cloud computing, and by the need for organisations to both reduce administration costs and increase flexibility. SkySQL is in a position to be a key player in this field," added Erik Jorgensen, investment director for Intel Capital in Western Europe.