In a modern world that heavily relies on communication and information, cloud services are a must to manage large amounts of data efficiently.

Cloud-data management solutions are quickly becoming the key to efficient data management in today's modern corporate environment, which relies more on communication and information. As a result, software development companies that offer these services are on the rise and in high demand.

Couchbase is Damien, James, Chris, Dustin, and Steve’s unique, multimodal, memory-first, highly scalable document store designed for mission-critical obligations that need performance at scale with all the capabilities of the traditional database.

Founded by merging two companies and NoSQL technologies, Couchbase has been used in areas like retail, e-commerce, travel, hospitality, social media, healthcare, media companies, financial services, and many more.

Read on to see how five guys made it to the clouds!

Setting the Foundation

The tech industry became bigger by one company - Couchbase, which started as the result of merging two already existing companies. The two companies were CouchOne and Membase. It all began when Damien Katz, the CEO at CouchOne, met James Phillips, the co-founder of Membase, back in 2010.

By that time, none of them knew much about each others’ company, but Damien was dazzled by the high-profile users of Membase, such as Zynga.

At that point, both companies pursued a different path; Membase was focused on fast, simple, and elastic performance and scalability, while CouchOne’s focus was on building accessible applications, mobile, sync, and offline use case, compactly merging all your apps and data with you at all times, safely backed up on the cloud.

And while independently both companies were doing well, they both had a lot more growing to do. Membase and CouchOne were both growing in the directions they needed to. Damien’s focus, as well as James’, although different, was also complimentary, and they made it work.

James was the first one to see the opportunity of a great outcome from merging the two companies, resulting in the emergence of Couchbase in 2011.

Behind the Success

Before Damien and James founded Couchbase and became a part of its devoted team, all of the co-founders had brought significant experience to the table, boasting a rich history of work in the tech industry.

Damien Katz is a software engineer and co-founder of Couchbase Inc. Damien started his career in 1995 as an intern in Lotus Notes. He left that company in 2005 and started working on Koobie, which then transitioned into CouchDB. He also co-founded CouchOne, which merged with Membase to, later on, develop Couchbase. After leaving Couchbase in 2013, he continued to work as an Architect in Salesforce. With many patents under his belt and acknowledgment in the tech world, he is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Amazon.

Chris Anderson graduated from Reed College in 2002, majoring in Philosophy. He entered the tech world as a CFO at Couchio in 2009. Since 2009, he has been an Apache CouchDB committer and co-founder of Couchbase until 2015. He now works as a Startup Operator at Protocol Labs. Chris is also a co-author of the O'Reilly book "CouchDB: The Definitive Guide."

James Phillips enrolled at the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, and in 1997 he got his MBA with Summa Cum Laude in the field of Business Economics and Finance.

Between 2004 and 2008, he was one of the co-founders and CEO of Akimbi systems. In 2009, James became part of Couchbase and worked as a Senior Vice President of Products, and co-founder, while moving on to be product-oriented. After leaving Couchbase in 2012, he started working for Microsoft, and currently, he is President of the Digital Transformation Platform Group there.

Another of the co-founders, Dustin Sallings started his career at Taos in 1997. In 1998, he was in the performance engineering team and core developer at Beyond.com. After leaving the company, he worked as a lead engineer responsible for scaling 2Wire's network. In 2008, he was one of the co-founders of NorthScale as a Chief Architect, which then merged into Couchbase. He remained there until 2014 and continued working on SPY Memcached client for Java, which he created in 1995 and runs it until this day.

Steve Yen enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 and got his BA degree in Computer Science in 1993. He co-founded Kiva in 1995 until Netscape acquired it in 1997. He then co-founded Escalate, an e-commerce and orders management software-as-a-service application. Escalate was developed by GE Retail systems in 2014. In 2008, Steve became the CTO, co-founder, and CEO of Membase, which then merged into Couchbase.

All About Couchbase

In today’s world, large amounts of unstructured data (i.e. NoSQL) are created. For example, companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google collect terabytes of user data every single day.

Traditional databases that are designed to store structured data in pre-created, planned schemas do not correspond well with the current trends. With the increasing amount of data all around, there was a need for a powerful database, and this is where Couchbase jumped in.

The company created a few internals that are really impressive per se and make it stand out from the other clouds and programs. Some of these internals are that Couchbase is super fast and can execute many operations at high speed. The highly flexible data model enables the databases to improve availability and scalability when updating your application.

It is always online, even when you are upgrading the database. Also, being fully distributed means your data will be stored on multiple machines throughout the world, making it more accessible and safe, and will lose no data.

Another perk that makes Couchbase a client-favorite is that it is built as fault-tolerant. This means that the system (computer, network, cloud cluster, etc) can operate without interruption and loss of service.

For its performance and scalability, Couchbase is used for big data and real-time web apps such as Ryanair, PNC banking, Pfizer, and even for games like the famous PokemonGo.

Couchbase is very successful and ranked as the fastest-growing company thanks to these performances.

Couchbase Going Public!

Before going public, Couchbase has had a total of 8 funding rounds and has raised a total of $251M, and most recently, its latest funding happened on May 21, 2020, in a Series G round raising $105M. 10 investors funded the company, 8 of which are leading investors. The most recent ones are Adams Street Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners & Growth Equity.

After chartering the waters of the tech industry, Couchbase decided it was time to go public. On July 21, 2021, Couchbase had its initial public offering, with their stock opening with $24.00 under the ticker NASDAQ: BASE. It raised $200.000M and is valued at $1.4 billion. Their current trading starts at $31.97, with a market capitalization of $1.43 billion. That’s a lot of greens, won’t you say?

Where Is Couchbase Headed?

Founded in Santa Clara in 2011, Couchbase holds two other offices on 3 continents. 2 in the United States (Austin, TX and San Francisco, CA), one in Bangalore, India, and 2 in the United Kingdom (London and Manchester).

Couchbase continues to improve with the most recent launch-hosted database-as-a-service, Couchbase Capella.

The founding team seems intent on going forward, and today there are more than 500 employees, all doing their best to make the company shine among the clouds. Besides offering positions in their offices, they also offer remote positions with excellent work-life balance, culture, values, and career opportunities. And, while the busy bees at Couchbase are working hard, the world recognized the company as one of the best places to work, earning Couchbase the 2021 Bay Area Best Places to Work award.

Couchbase has multiple awards for excellence and innovation in technology, databases, and NoSQL and has clients like Tesco, Verizon, Wells Fargo, LinkedIn, etc.

However, not everything was easy peasy for Couchbase, since it had to withstand some serious competition coming from companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and CloudDB, among many others.

After years of prospering in the market, Couchbase remains at the forefront of the NoSQL world while staying true to its initial goal - providing consistency and outstanding performance compared to other similar technologies based on real-world benchmarks.

So, next time you find yourself in a situation needing a reliable cloud service, give Couchbase a go, the company sure knows what it’s doing.