SurrealDB Secures $23M Series A Boost, Launches SurrealDB 3.0

SurrealDB Secures $23M Series A Boost, Launches SurrealDB 3.0 to Fix AI Agents’ Memory Problem

SurrealDB, the company behind the first multi-model, AI-native database has secured an additional $23 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total investment to-date (including seed) to $44M. This makes SurrealDB one of the best-funded database companies in history. 

Chalfen Ventures and Begin Capital join existing investors FirstMark and Georgian in this Series A extension, bringing the series total to $38M. Mike Chalfen of Chalfen Ventures, who has invested over $300 million in disruptive software startups, will join the company as a Director.

The funding extension comes as SurrealDB 3.0 is released under General Availability (GA) as the most stable, performant, and enterprise-ready release of the popular database. AI Agents need a unified view of state (semantic context, structured facts, and durable memory) but struggle to remember facts consistently, understand relationships, and to keep context and memory – particularly when data size and complexity grows. SurrealDB 3.0 is the only database to enable first-class agent memory and context graphs inside the database, so models run next to the data, context stays synchronised, and agent logic remains simple.

SurrealDB has become the fastest growing database of all time; it has been downloaded 2.3 million times; has attracted 31,000 GitHub stars; and has over 1,000 forks. Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, co-founder and CEO at SurrealDB says: “This fresh investment demonstrates a growing level of excitement for our category-defining, developer-friendly database. Chalfen Ventures and Begin Capital have joined this round due to our strong momentum in real-world usage, and clear path to large-scale production.”

Mike Chalfen, Founder at Chalfen Ventures says: “Every compute era requires a new database paradigm. We are in the AI era, but most ambitious enterprise AI projects stall. They need a data platform that makes unprecedentedly large-scale contextual information available to agentic systems, in a way that is synchronised across data sources, fast, and secure. SurrealDB is that platform. It meets the needs of both AI agents and enterprise data governance. It is the best on-ramp for companies looking to get native AI initiatives off the ground, and I believe that it can shape what it means for a business to be agent-ready.”

The new funding will help accelerate product maturity and adoption – especially around reliability, performance, security, cloud, and enterprise readiness. SurrealDB will also expand its team to scale its cloud offering and deepen support for production deployments.

SurrealDB 3.0: the persistent memory engine for intelligent systems

SurrealDB 3.0 is a next-generation database, built in Rust, and is designed to unify multiple data models into a single, powerful solution. It combines relational, document, graph, time-series, vector, search, geospatial and key-value data types with real-time capabilities. This allows developers to build AI applications faster and more efficiently. This is important because juggling multiple databases, and complex API layers to integrate them, reduces speed, increases complexity and cost. Consequently, AI Agents don’t have the right data, context or memory to generate relevant outcomes.

SurrealDB 3.0 comes with a host of new features which transform SurrealDB 3.0 into a persistent memory engine for intelligent systems.

Building AI agents

SurrealDB 3.0 moves beyond storing data: becoming the foundation for agent memory and intelligence. As developers build increasingly autonomous systems, the line between data, logic, and perception blurs. SurrealDB 3.0 evolves from a multi-model database into a multi-modal platform for AI agents – one that can understand, recall, and extend its own context.

Introducing Surrealism

New in 3.0, Surrealism is a new plugin ecosystem for AI native organizations. AI-ready by design, Surreal extensions turn SurrealDB into a programmable data and logic layer that is ideal for agentic and AI-heavy workloads.

Surrealism redefines the way that teams work with stored procedures – allowing for custom business logic, and access control layers as version-controlled, testable, and shareable modules. These plugins execute with full transactional guarantees, and can be used to manage everything from dynamic API behaviours to policy enforcement and auditing. More here.

SurrealDB 3.0 also handles structured records alongside images, audio, and documents – queryable within SurrealQL. Enhanced vector search and indexing let agents store and retrieve embeddings with millisecond precision. More here.

Justin Foley, VP of Engineering at Later says: “Every integration you carry is a compounding tax on speed and a ceiling on what you can build. SurrealDB collapses your data infrastructure into one. On that foundation, we built autonomous AI capabilities that would have been impossible on a conventional stack. Simplicity compounds into everything you build next.”

Stability, performance and tooling

SurrealDB 3.0 brings major architectural changes to improve stability, performance, and the developer experience. This release separates values from expressions, introduces Computed Fields, moves core metadata to ID‑based storage, makes synced writes the default, and re-designs how documents are represented on disk. The result is a faster, more stable database, and a cleaner path to future optimisation. Read more here.

Improved developer experience

As adoption has grown, developers are asking for a more predictable, extensible, and expressive way to build with SurrealDB. 3.0 brings a refined model that’s simpler to reason about and faster to build on. Developers can now define custom API endpoints directly within the database, manage complex workflows through client-side transactions, and express logic safely with Computed Fields and Record References. These upgrades transform how developers handle data relationships and integrate SurrealDB into real-world applications. Read more here.

Get started with SurrealDB 3.0.

About Chalfen Ventures

Chalfen Ventures backs one-of-a-kind, software-driven businesses poised to dominate new and unusual markets. As a solo VC, Mike Chalfen provides high-touch, low-ego support to early-stage founders in Europe – offering the deep experience of a top-tier firm without the friction of a partnership. Mike has a history of backing category-defining companies from their earliest stages. His portfolio includes ten unicorns including Illumio, King.com, Snyk, SuSE and Tipalti, alongside emerging leaders like Cogna, Crossbeam, DeBlock and Upciti.

About Begin Capital

Begin Capital is a London-based VC firm founded in 2019 that invests in early-stage (Seed to Series A) technology companies across Europe and the U.S. It invests in sectors like AI, SaaS, Fintech, and DeepTech, and provides hands-on support. Key partners include Alexey Menn and Ruslan Fomichev.

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