Cloudscape Inc, developer of the JBMS Java-embedded database, has raised a third round of financing and by the end of the year will release a version that incorporates a high-performance replication engine. The Oakland, California-based company has raised $10m this time, making $15.6m raised in total. This round was led by Mohr, Davidow Ventures, which invested $5m. The other new investors are St Paul Venture Capital and RB Webber, with $1.45m and $300,000 respectively. The money will be used to develop the replication engine as well as for sales and marketing expenses. Version 1.0 of the product shipped at the start of February and the 1.2 cut shipped last week, including an alpha version of the replication for developers to play with. The company plans a release each quarter. Next year Cloudscape will release a skinny version of JBMS aimed at the PDA and cellular telephone markets so that data can be replicated to those devices and displayed. The company’s VP marketing, Malcolm Colton says Cloudscape has about 100 customers at the moment and approximately 70 to 80 percent of its business so far comes from its ISV program. Some of these include Dow Jones, which is using Cloudscape’s JBMS for local storage of its pushed financial data. Colton says a deal is afoot with a nationwide hardware and software distributor that has a network of some 70,000 sub- distributors, but he couldn’t name it just yet. And to the usual charges that Java is just sluggish to be used to build database management system Colton says not so. He claims Java is in fact much faster to develop in than C and C++ due to its better memory management. Cloudscape’s existing venture capitalists that went around again this time are Brentwood Venture Capital with $1.5m, Accel Partners with $2m and private investors, Stewart Schuster, Roger Sippl, and Tom Haggin. Nancy Schoendorf of Mohr, Davidow Ventures joins the Cloudscape board. The company currently has 39 employees, with nine of those in sales, five in marketing and most of the rest in development.
