MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA — June 11, 2026 —
PhoenixAI, the Agentic AI Database, today announced an $80 million Series B funding round led by Sky9 Capital, with participation from Atypical Ventures and Olive Technology Ventures, and previous investors. The round will accelerate development of the company's AI-native database, expand its go-to-market initiatives, and deepen governance for regulated industries.
"Today’s agentic landscape has moved quickly from planning and prototyping to full-on production for mission-critical work — serving customers, managing supply chains, and driving internal workflows. Agents now fire off thousands of unplanned, real-time queries, often swarming systems with questions that weren’t anticipated when the data stack was designed, demanding analysis across live data, historical records, and multiple systems at once, which strains existing data stacks. PhoenixAI closes that gap by giving enterprises a faster, more efficient way to serve those workloads at scale with the level of governance the C-suite expects," said Rick Underwood, President of PhoenixAI.
Underwood leads go-to-market and operations at PhoenixAI. He was previously CEO of Clumio (acquired by Commvault) and held senior go-to-market leadership at Snowflake through its 2020 IPO.
Enterprise demand for infrastructure built specifically for AI agents is accelerating. Agents query differently than people: they operate in real time, issuing unpredictable questions no historical analytics stack was built to handle. As a result, answering agent questions requires joining live and historical data on the fly in ways that traditional databases were never designed to support. Traditional databases avoid that work by requiring teams to pre-model and reshape data for each “expected” question that human users may ask, but that approach breaks down the moment agents start asking new questions at scale.
Market leading companies including AppLovin, Coinbase, Conductor, and Demandbase already run PhoenixAI in production and are seeing the strategic advantage it delivers.
“PhoenixAI changed the equation: streaming updates from Kafka become queryable within seconds, analysts get sub-second responses on live normalized data, and our AI agents operate on the same real-time dataset. This level of performance at scale fundamentally changes what data teams can do.”
— Xinyu Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Coinbase“PhoenixAI now serves that workload as the real-time analytical database on top of our data lakehouse. Production queries scanning hundreds of millions of rows return in under a second, and this is the architecture we need for the next generation of agentic workloads.”
— Wei Zheng, Chief Product Officer, Conductor“PhoenixAI gives us a fast, isolated warehouse for agent workloads directly on our Apache Iceberg tables, with the optimizer handling novel joins automatically.”
— Ryan Nowacoski, Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform, DemandbaseSky9 Capital is a global venture firm focused on AI, fintech, and deep tech, and has backed frontier AI leaders including Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi, and autonomous-driving company WeRide. Sky9 now leads PhoenixAI’s Series B round.
“The move to agentic AI is one of the largest infrastructure shifts we’ve seen, and the database is at the center of it. Enterprises can’t put agents into production until something can serve them live data at the speed and scale agents now demand. That’s the problem PhoenixAI was built to solve, and we’ve been impressed by the company’s early traction with demanding enterprise customers — we’re proud to lead this round and back the company defining the category,” said Ron Cao, Founder and Managing Partner, Sky9 Capital.
About PhoenixAI
PhoenixAI is the Agentic AI Database, purpose-built to give autonomous AI agents sub-second access to live enterprise data at massive scale. The platform unifies real-time and at-rest data in a single AI-native engine, combining the speed and concurrency that agentic workloads demand with the governance and deployment flexibility enterprises require to put AI into production. Formerly known as CelerData, PhoenixAI is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Learn more at https://www.phoenixdata.ai/
About Sky9 Capital
Sky9 Capital is a global venture firm investing in AI, fintech, and deep tech, with offices in San Francisco, Boston, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore.