Crate was the winner of TechCrunch Disrupt Europe startup Battlefield in 2014. The company focused on developing a new database container for next generation SQL technology.

Founded in 2013 by Christian Lutz, Bernd Dorn and Jodok Batlogg, Crate Technology was established to create a new kind of data solution using an infinite scalable SQL database. The company introduced a new approach of SQL technology which called containerized architectures.

On Tuesday, the company announced to raise $4 million in seed funding round. The round was led by London-based Dawn Capital. Another participants are existing investors Sunstone Capital, DFJ Esprit and Speedinvest. Founder of Docker, Inc. the application virtualization company Solomon Hykes also participated in this round.

As quoted by Tech Crunch, Hykes said in an announcement, "Crate's simplicity and masterless architecture make it a perfect match for containerized environments." Hykes is a known developer in an open source world and CTO of Docker. "I expect to see it widely deployed as more developers adopt the new microservices paradigm." 

Crate shares the same philosophy as Hykes' Docker in open-source technology. Crate is an open-source SQL database based on shared-nothing masterless architecture which enable significant performance increase thus maintaining scalability and simplicity. The solution has a simplicity of NoSQL in combination with standard SQL syntax to access the data.

Such combination gives Crate a top-notch performance and cost-saving in reusable application code. As developers can maintain their SQL structured database and use the Crate's dynamic schema. Crate is a perfect database suit for hyper-growth applications in IoT, security and web-based application.

In the last six months, the database has been downloaded more than 350,000 times. While its production clusters is now able to process billions of daily inserts, real-time search and aggregations on trillions of documents.

Crate Co-founder and CEO Christian Lutz told PE Hub Network, "The next logical stride after application containers is distributed database containers. The market is telling us that operational and analytics requirements are converging – people want to use one database for both needs," explaining the philosophy behind Crate's database.

"This and our distributed SQL engine have spurred several massive deployments of Crate with enterprises, and the new investment will allow us to continue our aggressive growth, add more features and support our growing community of users."

While Dawn Capital's Ari Helgason told Business Wire, "At Dawn, we have a particular interest in open source businesses, and the usage growth seen by Crate over the past year is exceptional. The company has assembled a world-class team and we are excited about joining forces with them and supporting them as they expand their customer base around the world."

Crate and its next generation SQL database has raised seed funding on Tuesday. Dawn Capital led the $4 million funding with participation from Sunstone Capital, Draper Esprit, Speedinvest and Solomon Hykes.