Basho Technologies

» see basho.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Business Development Corporation of America lent Basho Technologies $10 million in March 2015. By 27 September 2016, according to the filing it later put before a Washington court, "events of default had occurred and were continuing". In early July 2017 it asked for a receiver, telling the court one was necessary "because the borrower is in default under the Loan Documents and in financial freefall". King County Superior Court granted it on 14 July and handed the company to Pivotal Solutions of Renton, Washington.

Basho had started in 2008 in Bellevue, Washington, founded by two Akamai people, Earl Galleher and Antony Falco. Its product was Riak, a distributed key-value store written in Erlang that implemented the ideas in Amazon's 2007 Dynamo paper. There was no master node. Data was spread around a ring of machines that stayed available through failures, on the understanding that two readers might briefly disagree about what they saw. For a few years around 2012 it was one of the most respected names in the NoSQL field.

The users were not hobby projects. Riot Games ran League of Legends chat on Riak and said so in its own engineering talks, quoting 67 million monthly players against a peak of 7.5 million of them online at once. NHS Digital moved the English patient record Spine off Oracle onto Riak in 2013, and confirmed to The Register in 2017 that it was still running on it, unsupported, while the vendor was being liquidated. Basho raised roughly $66 million across seven rounds and never turned any of that into a business that could pay a $10 million loan.

~ the dossier ~

~ the investor ~

Georgetown Capital Partners led Basho's 2012 round and again in 2015, and by the end held 65% of the board's voting power. In late 2015 Earl Galleher, by then an ousted chairman, sued Georgetown and its managing director Chester Davenport in the Delaware Court of Chancery, alleging that the funding terms had been punitive and that a chief executive had been installed without the full board. Basho said it did not comment on pending litigation.

The case outlived the company. In July 2018, a year after the receivership, Vice Chancellor Laster found that Georgetown Basho Investors and Davenport had breached their fiduciary duties and ordered them to pay roughly $20.3 million. Most startup collapses leave behind a story about a controlling investor that nobody ever tests. This one went in front of a judge who put a number on it. One caveat for anyone citing that figure from here: the opinion itself is paywalled or blocked from this end, and the $20.3 million comes from law-firm summaries of it rather than from the text.

~ how the engineering left ~

The Register's reporting in July 2017 traced the hollowing out to 2014, when a new leadership team changed how the company worked. Chief architect Andy Gross and chief technology officer Justin Sheehy, the two people who had written Riak, both departed that year. One source told the paper that by the end of 2015 "all but two" of the engineers hired between 2010 and 2014 had gone. The last UK staff were let go in March 2017 and the London office closed in May, two months before the court filing.

~ the database kept going ~

On 25 August 2017 Martin Davies, chief executive of technology at the gambling company bet365, posted to the Riak mailing list that bet365 had agreed to buy Basho's remaining assets. "It is our intention to open source all of Basho's products and all of the source code that they have been working on," he wrote. bet365 was already a Riak user, so what it bought out of the liquidation was the continued existence of a database it had built on.

That is why Riak is not in this cemetery and Basho is. The enterprise features that had been held back were folded into the open release by Riak KV 2.2.6 in May 2018, and the code has been maintained by volunteers ever since, latterly under an organization called OpenRiak with a working group inside the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. Riak KV 3.4.0 was announced in January 2026 and the repositories were still being pushed to in October 2026. Meanwhile basho.com redirects to riak.com, which is the old marketing site frozen in place, still advertising version 2.2 as the new release with nobody's name on it.

~ from here ~

I have never run Riak. Distributed databases for other people's traffic are not what my working life has been about, and in 2017 I was doing computer vision in Ankara rather than operations anywhere. The reason this one earns a page anyway is the way the value sat in the wrong column at the end. A company with $66 million behind it could not keep the lights on, and the software it had been trying to sell is still being released nine years later by people doing it for nothing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »