Cockroach Continuum (CockroachDB)

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 in New York City by former Google engineers Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis and Ben Darnell, a year after the first CockroachDB design was published on GitHub. It builds CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database designed for zero downtime at any scale, for enterprises that cannot afford outages or manual sharding of their transactional systems.

CockroachDB speaks the PostgreSQL wire protocol, lets every node accept reads and writes, rebalances data automatically and survives node, zone or region failures. In September 2026 the company launched Cockroach Continuum, which virtualizes many isolated databases on shared or dedicated capacity, adds the Plenum elastic storage layer, the Aegis AI operator for diagnostics and recommendations, and bills by vCPU-hours and bytes used. It runs fully managed on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, in the customer's cloud account, or self-hosted on Kubernetes and on-premises, with customers such as DoorDash, OpenAI, Booking.com, NVIDIA, SoFi and Groww.

• Distributed SQL: Every node accepts reads and writes with automatic rebalancing and hotspot detection.
• PostgreSQL compatibility: Supports the PostgreSQL wire protocol, most syntax, drivers and ORMs.
• Database virtualization: Runs many isolated databases as one system on shared or dedicated capacity.
• Plenum storage: Elastic storage layer that scales independently and bills for bytes stored.
• Aegis AI operator: Monitors databases, flags issues and recommends fixes while admins keep control.
• Flexible deployment: Managed on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, in the customer's account, or self-hosted.

A Vietnamese securities company can run its order and account databases on a multi-region cluster that survives a data center outage during trading hours. A payment intermediary can consolidate dozens of PostgreSQL instances into one virtualized fleet billed by actual usage. A SaaS vendor can give each enterprise customer an isolated database without managing separate servers.

Enterprises pay for the work their databases actually perform instead of provisioning for peak, since Continuum pools capacity across the fleet. Applications stay online through infrastructure failures, with a 99.999 percent multi-region SLA on the Mission Critical edition. Large customers on the site run at substantial scale, for example DoorDash with 1.9 PB of live data and 1.2 million queries per second across more than 300 clusters after migrating from Aurora Postgres.

AI agents and fast-growing digital services create unpredictable, spiky database load, pushing enterprises toward consumption-based and self-healing database platforms. Banks, brokerages and payment firms in Southeast Asia are also modernizing core and digital channels on distributed SQL to meet near-zero downtime expectations and multi-region resilience requirements.

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York City, with offices in Austin, Bangalore, London and Toronto. It has raised 633 million USD from investors including Benchmark, Sequoia, GV, Index Ventures, Greenoaks, Coatue, Tiger Global and JPMorgan. The Mission Critical edition includes PCI DSS and HIPAA compliance.