Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, sits in a tough position in the database market. On one side, it has traditional database vendors like Oracle, and on the other there’s AWS and its family of databases. It takes some good technology and serious dollars to compete with those companies. Cockroach took care of the latter with a $55 million Series C round today.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital  and Tiger Global along with existing investor GV. Other existing investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Work-Bench also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $110 million, according to the company.

Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO, says the company is building a modern database to compete with these industry giants. “CockroachDB is architected from the ground up as a cloud native database. Fundamentally, what that means is that it’s distributed, not just across nodes in a single data center, which is really table stakes as the database gets bigger, but also across data centers to be resilient. It’s also distributed potentially across the planet in order to give a global customer base what feels like a local experience to keep the data near them,” Kimball explained.

At the same time, even while it has a cloud product hosted on AWS, it also competes with several AWS database products including Amazon Aurora, Redshift and DynamoDB. Much like MongoDB, which changed its open source licensing structure last year, Cockroach did as well, for many of the same reasons. They both believed bigger players were taking advantage of the open source nature of their products to undermine their markets.

“If you’re trying to build a business around an open source product, you have to be careful that a much bigger player doesn’t come along and extract too much of the value out of the open source product that you’ve been building and maintaining,” Kimball explained.

Read the full article on TechCrunch here.