CockroachDB
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built by Cockroach Labs to support systems that cannot fail, in sectors such as payments, identity, and AI infrastructure.
Last updated September 15, 2026
AI crawler reads
2requests
1companies- Anthropic2
- Profile
- 2
- Controversies
- 0
- JSON · MD
- 0
- First read
- Nov 4, 2026
- Latest read
- Nov 4, 2026
From this site's server log
Overview
CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database from Cockroach Labs, a company founded in 2015 by three former Google engineers: Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. According to Cockroach Labs, the database is built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure. Cockroach Labs states that CockroachDB runs workloads that cannot fail, with banks, payment networks, and health systems among those where an outage is a headline and a lost transaction a liability. The company also offers Cockroach Continuum, described as an Agentic Database Cloud built on CockroachDB, adding storage and compute elasticity along with agentic operations.
History
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015 by three former Google engineers: Spencer Kimball, Peter Mattis, and Ben Darnell. According to Cockroach Labs, Kimball and Mattis met Darnell at Google, where they spent a decade building infrastructure at a scale not seen elsewhere at the time. When Kimball and Mattis left to build a photo-sharing company, they encountered the limitations of available databases and an unacceptable trade-off between resilience at scale and transactional correctness. That experience sparked the idea for CockroachDB. Kimball wrote the first design in 2014 and shared it on GitHub. The project won Open Source Rookie of the Year before it had a business plan. The following year, Benchmark Capital led a $6.3 million seed round, with Google Ventures, Sequoia and FirstMark alongside. Their premise was that the trade-off wasn't necessary: a database could lose a machine, a data center or a region and still keep every transaction correct. Cockroach Labs states that CockroachDB is a distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure. A decade on, Cockroach Labs built Continuum to keep thousands of databases correct while they appear, grow and disappear on their own.
Products and positioning
A distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail, with a focus on correctness, resilience, and scale.
CockroachDB
A distributed SQL database built to support systems that cannot fail in sectors like payments, identity, and AI infrastructure.
Cockroach Continuum
An Agentic Database Cloud built on CockroachDB, adding storage and compute elasticity along with agentic operations.
Recent events
Sources5 sources
- 1Cockroach Labs | Continuum built on CockroachDB the agentic distributed cloud database estatecockroachlabs.com
- 2CockroachDB: Professional Services - Cockroach Labscockroachlabs.com
- 3About Cockroach Labscockroachlabs.com
- 4Cockroach Continuum: The Agentic Database Cloud by Cockroach Labscockroachlabs.com
- 5CockroachDB 获得 Red Hat 容器认证prnewswire.com
Cite this profile: Cite the canonical profile. /brand-wiki/cockroachdb · Editorial policy · How profiles are compiled