Cockroach Labs, a software company specializing in cloud-native SQL databases, has established a strong presence in India since its arrival years ago. With a team of over 55 engineers, including experts in database and cloud engineering, the company’s journey in India is not just strategic, but also emotional. Co-founder and CEO Spencer Kimball shared in a recent interview that India’s exceptional technical talent and entrepreneurial mindset make Bengaluru the perfect location for their mission.
The connection with Bengaluru goes beyond emotions and is also deeply strategic. The city serves as an ideal hub for Cockroach Labs to scale its operations in the Asia-Pacific region, thanks to its advantageous time zone and access to a diverse talent pool. With a population of 1.4 billion and a rapidly digitizing economy, India serves as a proving ground for resilience and scalability. Kimball also highlighted how the demands of Indian enterprises, particularly in sectors like banking, media, and logistics, align perfectly with CockroachDB’s strengths in handling scale and regulatory requirements.
The story of Cockroach Labs’ inception is one of necessity and innovation. Kimball, along with co-founders Ben Darnell and Peter Mattis, spent a decade at Google, working on groundbreaking projects like Gmail, Google Reader, and Colossus. Their experience at Google shaped their understanding of the need for resilient and distributed systems. However, after leaving Google and starting their own startup, Viewfinder, they faced challenges due to the absence of a transactional distributed database. This led to the birth of Cockroach Labs in 2014, with a vision to create an open-source, cloud-native distributed database that combines the best of both relational databases and NoSQL.
The company’s roots in Google have also influenced its approach to resilience. Kimball recalled how Google’s low-cost infrastructure led them to build redundant and distributed systems, and their frustration with DynamoDB’s lack of transactional capabilities inspired them to create CockroachDB. Today, Cockroach Labs’ database is used by enterprises across various industries, and its presence in India continues to grow, driven by the city’s strategic and emotional significance for the company.
