SurrealDB
SurrealDB is a London-based open-source, AI-native multi-model database unifying documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, and relational queries in one ACID engine, serving AI agent developers and regulated enterprises across defence, finance, healthcare, retail, and gaming.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2022
- HeadquartersLondon, United Kingdom
- Headcount11–50
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What SurrealDB does
SurrealDB is a London-headquartered, venture-backed private company (SurrealDB Ltd., incorporated in England and Wales) that develops an open-source, Rust-native multi-model database unifying documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, full-text search, and relational queries in a single ACID transaction accessed via SurrealQL. The platform is organised as a vertically integrated four-layer stack: SurrealDB as the multi-model engine, Spectron as the AI agent memory layer with built-in MCP server, SurrealDS as the Gen-3 distributed storage engine using quorum consensus on commodity object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob), and Surrealism as a WebAssembly extension framework for in-database custom logic. Deployments span embedded, in-memory, edge, single-server, and distributed configurations from a single binary.
The company monetises through a hybrid model: a usage-based SurrealDB Cloud Start tier ($0/month free, then $0.021/hour plus storage and egress), a quote-based Scale tier for production workloads with multi-AZ and multi-region disaster recovery, and custom-priced Enterprise self-hosted licensing for regulated industries. Tiered commercial support subscriptions (Standard, Business Critical, Premium) layer on top, with Premium including a named Technical Account Manager and 30-minute Severity 1 response. Go-to-market combines product-led growth (free tier, open-source GitHub repo with 32.5k stars, Surrealist IDE, Discord community of 933 online users, SDKs across nine languages) with enterprise field sales targeting defence, finance, healthcare, gaming, energy, and retail verticals.
Customers include Samsung Ads (real-time knowledge graphs), Verizon (AI assistant for 10,000 field technicians), Tencent (consolidated nine backend systems into an 8M-node, 10k+ QPS monitoring platform), PolyAI (~30ms RAG latency in voice AI), Permit.io (OPA replacement), Aspire (700,000 users in 8 hours after replacing five backend tools), plus reference logos in Babcock, ING, Walmart, Apple, BYD, Shield AI, and Saks Fifth Avenue. As of February 2026, the company had raised $44 million cumulatively across a $6M seed (January 2023, FirstMark Capital and Matt Turck) and a $23M Series A extension (Chalfen Ventures and Begin Capital leading, with FirstMark and Georgian participating). Compliance footprint includes SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, CCPA, and Cyber Essentials Plus, with HIPAA and PCI-DSS in progress.
SurrealDB firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- SurrealDB
- Legal name
- SurrealDB Ltd.
- Website
- https://surrealdb.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2022
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 11–50 employees
- Short description
- SurrealDB is a London-based open-source, AI-native multi-model database unifying documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, and relational queries in one ACID engine, serving AI agent developers and regulated enterprises across defence, finance, healthcare, retail, and gaming.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
SurrealDB industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Multi-Model Database Software
- NAICS
- Software Publishers (5132), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182), Custom Computer Programming Services (541511)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) Platforms (HDAEAAAN)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- NewSQL / Distributed SQL Databases (HDAEAAAC), Enterprise AI Data & Knowledge Platforms (Vector Databases, Knowledge Graphs) (HDAEANAH), Data & Analytics Platforms (Data Warehousing, Lakes, Streaming) (HDABAAAF), In-Memory Databases (HDAEAAAD)
Keywords
Where SurrealDB is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- London
- HQ country
- United Kingdom
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices5 records
Markets served
SurrealDB business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations
Revenue model
- SurrealDB Cloud subscription (Start tier): Self-serve cloud database service billed monthly based on usage: free tier up to 1GB storage forever, then usage-based at $0.021/hour for burstable/general-purpose compute, storage (per GB), and network egress. Customers are invoiced monthly for compute, storage, and network usage.
- SurrealDB Cloud Scale plan: Production-grade cloud offering with fault tolerance, high availability, multi-AZ deployment, horizontal scaling to petabytes, multi-region disaster recovery, and object-storage-backed data. Pricing is "talk to us" / not publicly disclosed, suggesting committed-volume contracts.
- Enterprise self-hosted licensing: On-premises or private-cloud deployment license with custom pricing. Includes priority security patching, FIPS-compliant cryptography, audit logging, encryption at rest, object storage support, distributed live queries, trusted execution environments, dedicated engineering support, and commercial SLA-backed support tiers.
- Commercial support subscriptions: Tiered support add-ons: Standard (business hours, 8-hr Sev1 response, $0 / community), Business Critical (24x7, 2-hr Sev1), and Premium (24x7, 30-min Sev1, dedicated Slack, named TAM). These subscriptions layer on top of Cloud or Enterprise plans.
- Open-source community (free): SurrealDB is open source and free to self-host, providing community-driven adoption that funnels into Cloud and Enterprise monetization via land-and-expand dynamics from developer adoption to production deployment.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Usage-based | Monthly | Start: Free tier with usage-based upgrades |
| Hybrid | Multi-year contract | Scale: Fault-tolerant production workloads |
| Other | Multi-year contract | Enterprise: Self-hosted on private infrastructure |
| Subscription | Annual | Standard support (add-on) |
| Subscription | Annual | Business Critical support (add-on) |
| Subscription | Annual | Premium support (add-on) |
Go-to-market motion5 records
Distribution channels7 records
Marketing channels11 records
SurrealDB product offering
Product offeringCore offering
SurrealDB sells an AI-native, multi-model database platform that unifies documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, full-text search, geospatial and relational data in a single ACID transaction, accessed via the SurrealQL query language. The platform spans four layers — the SurrealDB core engine, the Spectron agent memory layer, the SurrealDS Gen-3 distributed storage engine on commodity object storage, and the managed SurrealDB Cloud service — and is delivered as open-source self-hosted software, a managed cloud database (Start, Scale, Enterprise tiers) and a self-hosted Enterprise license with premium support for regulated industries.
Product overview
SurrealDB offers a platform-plus-modules architecture organised as 'one stack, four layers': the core multi-model database SurrealDB (documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, full-text, relational in one ACID transaction), Spectron (the agent memory layer built directly on top), SurrealDS (the Gen 3 distributed storage engine that provides quorum consensus on commodity object storage), and SurrealDB Cloud (the managed service that runs the full platform on AWS). Supporting tools include Surrealist (visual IDE), Surrealism (WebAssembly extension framework), SurrealQL (the multi-model query language), Sidekick (AI assistant for SurrealQL), Labs (examples/integrations repo), and University (learning program). Together these layers deliver 'the context layer for AI agents' — a vertically integrated stack from object storage to agent memory in a single transactional database, deployable from embedded/edge devices to petabyte-scale clusters.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- Spectron: Persistent, queryable, autonomous agent memory layer built on top of SurrealDB.
- SurrealDS
- Surrealism
- Surrealist
- SurrealDB Cloud
Products and services
- SurrealDB Multi-model database combining documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, full-text search and relational queries in a single ACID transaction, built in Rust and accessed via the SQL-like SurrealQL query language. Deployable as in-memory, embedded, edge, WASM, single-node or distributed and sold to enterprises and AI developers building AI-native applications.
- Spectron Persistent, queryable, autonomous memory platform for AI agents built directly on SurrealDB, unifying episodic, identity, knowledge, context, instructions and uncertainty memory with tri-temporal history, supersession-based reconciliation, eight-signal hybrid retrieval and a built-in MCP server. Sold to developers and enterprises building autonomous AI agents and AI-native applications.
- SurrealDS Horizontally scalable, highly-available Gen-3 distributed storage engine for SurrealDB with quorum consensus and compute-storage separation on commodity object storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob). Sold as the storage backbone of SurrealDB to enterprises needing scale-to-zero, instant petabyte branching and recovery time independent of dataset size.
- SurrealDB Cloud Fully managed cloud database service running SurrealDB and Spectron on AWS with provisioning, automated backups, monitoring, scaling and security patches. Offered as free tier, Scale tier and Enterprise tier and available on AWS Marketplace; sold to developers, mid-market companies and enterprises needing a managed multi-model and agent-memory database.
- Surrealist IDE Visual IDE for SurrealDB providing a query view, graph visualisation, table explorer, authentication management, functions editor, API documentation and a personal sandbox. Available as a web app and macOS desktop application; positions Surrealist as a free onramp tool for new developers.
- Surrealism (WebAssembly extension framework) Open-source WebAssembly extension framework letting developers write custom functions in Rust (with experimental JavaScript and Python) that compile to WASM and execute inside the database with full transactional guarantees, hot-loadable with zero downtime and isolated in WASM sandboxes. Sold to developers and enterprises that need to run custom logic, ML inference or LLM calls inside SurrealDB transactions.
Quantifiable outcome
- Up to 70% total cost of ownership savings by eliminating multiple specialized database systems
- +10 more outcomes
Companies that use SurrealDB
Customer profileNamed customers15 records
Segments9 records
Ideal customer profiles4 records
SurrealDB technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration28 records
AI capability15 records
Feature10 records
SurrealDB partnerships and signals
Strategic signalScale indicators15 records
Recent moves6 records
Expansion highlights7 records
SurrealDB competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- ArangoDB: ArangoDB is a native multi-model database unifying documents, graphs, and key-value pairs in a single engine with a SQL-like query language (AQL). It is the closest direct competitor to SurrealDB on the multi-model consolidation thesis, serving similar developer and enterprise buyers who want to replace polyglot database stacks with a single ACID-compliant engine.
- Pinecone: Pinecone is a managed vector database purpose-built for production AI workloads including RAG and semantic search. It competes directly with SurrealDB's vector search capabilities and Spectron's agent memory layer for AI-native buyer mindshare, with deep venture backing and an early-mover position in the vector DB category.
- Weaviate: Weaviate is an open-source vector database with hybrid search, RAG, and generative search modules, plus a managed cloud offering. It overlaps directly with SurrealDB's vector + AI agent use cases and shares the open-source-plus-cloud GTM motion targeting developers building AI-native applications.
- Qdrant: Qdrant is a high-performance open-source vector database written in Rust with strong semantic search and recommendation capabilities. As a Rust-native vector engine, it is one of the closest architectural analogues to SurrealDB and competes for the same AI/RAG developer audience.
- Milvus / Zilliz: Milvus is an open-source vector database purpose-built for large-scale similarity search, with Zilliz as its commercial sponsor. It competes with SurrealDB's vector and multi-model capabilities for AI workloads, particularly where enterprise buyers want a specialized engine optimized for billion-scale vector retrieval.
- Neo4j: Neo4j is the leading native graph database with Cypher query language and graph data science capabilities. It is a direct competitor to SurrealDB on graph workloads (SurrealDB claims ~35x faster performance on indexed predicate filter scans), and both target enterprise buyers building knowledge graphs and AI-driven analytics.
- SingleStore: SingleStore is a distributed SQL database with native vector functions, full-text search, and JSON support, positioning itself as a multi-model real-time data platform. It overlaps directly with SurrealDB on combining relational, document, and vector workloads in a single engine for AI and real-time analytics use cases.
Broad incumbents
- MongoDB: MongoDB is the leading document database with vector search and (via Atlas) graph capabilities layered on top. It is a broad incumbent that competes with SurrealDB on document and AI workloads from a much larger commercial installed base and stronger enterprise sales motion.
- Redis: Redis is an in-memory data store with vector search (RediSearch), JSON, and graph capabilities, plus durable options. It is a broad incumbent that overlaps with SurrealDB's in-memory SurrealMX engine on cache-like workloads, with a far larger enterprise installed base and broader developer adoption.
Emerging players
- TimescaleDB: TimescaleDB is a time-series database built on PostgreSQL with vector capabilities added via pgvector. It competes with SurrealDB's time-series and vector modalities, particularly for IoT and telemetry workloads where SurrealDB cites predictive maintenance and edge computing as primary use cases.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat7 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
SurrealDB social profiles
Digital presenceSurrealDB compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance9 records
SurrealDB financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
SurrealDB leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles6 records
SurrealDB subsidiaries and ownership
Company hierarchySubsidiaries2 records
SurrealDB funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds3 records
Investors6 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
SurrealDB M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about SurrealDB
What does SurrealDB do?
SurrealDB sells an AI-native, multi-model database platform that unifies documents, graphs, vectors, time-series, full-text search, geospatial and relational data in a single ACID transaction, accessed via the SurrealQL query language. The platform spans four layers — the SurrealDB core engine, the Spectron agent memory layer, the SurrealDS Gen-3 distributed storage engine on commodity object storage, and the managed SurrealDB Cloud service — and is delivered as open-source self-hosted software, a managed cloud database (Start, Scale, Enterprise tiers) and a self-hosted Enterprise license with premium support for regulated industries.
Is SurrealDB a public or private company?
SurrealDB is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was SurrealDB founded?
SurrealDB was founded in 2022. It employs 11 to 50 people.
Where is SurrealDB based?
SurrealDB is headquartered in London, United Kingdom, in the Europe region.
How does SurrealDB make money?
Five revenue lines are on record. SurrealDB Cloud subscription (Start tier) is the primary driver. The others are surrealDB Cloud Scale plan, enterprise self-hosted licensing, commercial support subscriptions and open-source community (free).
Who are SurrealDB's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are ArangoDB, Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, Milvus / Zilliz, Neo4j and SingleStore. Broad incumbents are MongoDB and Redis. TimescaleDB is listed as an emerging player.
Does SurrealDB have an API?
Yes. SurrealDB exposes a REST API for querying and managing data over HTTP endpoints, a GraphQL endpoint with schema generator, and a Postgres-compatible wire protocol. The Spectron platform ships with a built-in Model Context Protocol (MCP) server exposing seven tools (remember, recall, context, reflect, forget, upload, inspect) over HTTP. SurrealDB also offers a DEFINE API feature in SurrealQL for defining custom API endpoints, middleware, and database behaviors directly inside the engine. Generated SDKs are available in Python, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Swift for Spectron. Developer documentation is at surrealdb.com/docs/reference/rest-api.
What industry is SurrealDB in?
SurrealDB's product category is Multi-Model Database Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAEAAAN, Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) Platforms, with a secondary code of HDAEAAAC, NewSQL / Distributed SQL Databases. Its NAICS code is 5132 and its SIC code is 7372.