CedarDB Aims to Handle Both Transactions and Analytics as AI Agents Raise the Stakes
Databases have traditionally been designed for either analytical or operational workloads. CedarDB's engine supports both, and its approach has become relevant with the rise of agentic AI.
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Databases have traditionally been built for one of two jobs. Analytical databases help businesses identify trends and answer questions, while operational databases store daily records of transactions, such as orders and payments. But Munich-based database engine CedarDB supports both, its founder and CEO Moritz Seichert told TechCrunch, and its approach has been linked to the rise of agentic artificial intelligence.
CedarDB has been in the works for the past decade, but its current momentum comes from enterprise companies whose existing data stacks may be suitable for storing years of transactions, but are less suitable for quickly answering analytical questions asked of that data in natural language.
CedarDB's question about the gap between analytical and operational queries is a byproduct of its focus on efficiency. The company is one of the Technical University of Munich based on Umbra, a research project built from the ground up to beat legacy database engines with processing speed by making the most of modern hardware.
With five Umbra researchers as its co-founders, CedarDB maintained this approach, promising faster performance without requiring more CPU or processing power and memory—and requiring little change from customers. In particular, its team ensured that CedarDB is compatible with PostgreSQL, an open source database system.
According to Sichert, this compatibility with popular databases helps keep switching costs down because users don't need to rebuild their applications. It also has an added benefit: CedarDB follows logic that LLMs are familiar with as a result of their training.
Sichert said the decision was one of many that, in retrospect, was fortunate. But it was not all luck. In a blog post, co-founder Christian Winter explained the key priorities the team set after leaving academia, "such as reliability, fault tolerance and compatibility with popular tools."
Not all answers were clear. The team debated fiercely whether to launch a cloud offering right away. In the end, it launched CedarDB Enterprise as an in-house offering alongside its free version, CedarDB Community Edition, both of which were announced in May of last year at the same time it announced a €5.3 million (roughly $6 million) seed funding round.
The cloud offering was only delayed, but not abandoned. After beta testing with users signed up to its waiting list, the company announced the limited availability of CedarDB Cloud on Wednesday on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, where it will compete with 20 other startups competing to win TC's prestigious Startup Battlefield competition.
A fully managed, cloud-hosted version will likely help CedarDB expand its user base beyond large enterprises. It also makes it better prepared to compete with the likes of Databricks, a big data company that appears to have reached a similar conclusion to the German startup.
At its Data + AI Summit in June, the US company cited the "age of agency" as the reason for launching LTAP, a new data architecture aimed at "[unifying] transactional, analytics, streaming and operational data into a single copy of the storage lake".
It's too early to tell how disruptive this will be, but Seichert interprets Databricks' move as another sign that there is demand for what CedarDB does. This startup plans to serve its first cloud users with its current team of 14 people. But Sichert expects he'll need a bigger team once he gains more traction. And this is where we raise our next round.
Pictured from left to right: CedarDB founders Moritz Sichert, Lucas Vogel, Philip Fant, Dominique Dörner and Christian Winter.
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Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.
You can contact or confirm Anna by emailing annatechcrunch [at].
As a freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021, he has covered a wide range of startup-related topics including artificial intelligence, fintech and tech insurance, SaaS and pricing, and global venture capital trends.
From May 2025, his reporting for TechCrunch focuses on Europe's hottest startup stories.
Anna moderates panels and conducts on-stage interviews at industry events of all sizes, including major tech conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt, 4YFN, South Summit, TNW Conference, VivaTech and many others.
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