Fauna

Fauna was a pioneering distributed serverless database company that revolutionized how developers approached data infrastructure from 2012 to 2025. Founded by ex-Twitter engineers Evan Weaver and Matt Freels, Fauna emerged from their experiences scaling Twitter's infrastructure, where they struggled to build a distributed backend that could serve critical business objects like tweets, timelines, and user profiles in a timely and globally consistent manner.

Fauna's innovative architecture was built on the Calvin protocol, making it one of the only commercial database systems to implement this advanced distributed transaction technology. The platform delivered strict serializability—the highest level of distributed strong consistency—without latency or cost trade-offs that plagued competing solutions. This unique multi-active engine ensured strong consistency, low latency, and high availability across availability zones or regions, abstracting all operational and scaling overhead for developers.

The company served developers building data-driven applications across e-commerce, web development, and gaming sectors. Fauna's serverless architecture combined document flexibility with native relational capabilities through native joins, supporting dynamic workloads while providing ACID transactions, temporal queries, multi-region consistency, and global low latency. Developers could query data using FQL (Fauna Query Language) or GraphQL, with FQL offering an expression-oriented approach similar to LINQ that unified document, relational, and graph query paradigms.

Fauna raised $60 million in total funding from premier investors including Madrona Venture Group, Addition Capital, GV (Google Ventures), and Charles River Ventures. In 2020, the company raised $27 million in Series B funding and brought on new executive leadership, with Eric Berg (former CPO of Okta) joining as CEO and Bob Muglia (former CEO of Snowflake) becoming executive chairman. The platform served over 3,000 development teams across numerous enterprises managing more than 195 databases.

In 2024, Fauna introduced significant product innovations including the Fauna Schema Language (FSL) for declarative schema enforcement and Computed Fields for dynamically generated field values. The company also integrated with AWS Marketplace for Pay-As-You-Go billing, Cloudflare Workers for edge computing, and Datadog for observability. However, in March 2025, Fauna announced it would shut down its managed database service on May 30, 2025, citing the capital-intensive nature of scaling a new operational database globally in challenging market conditions. The company committed to releasing an open-source version of its core database technology, drivers, and CLI tooling, ensuring the innovative Calvin-based architecture would continue benefiting the developer community despite the closure of its commercial service.