PhoenixAI, an Agentic AI Database, announced an $80 million Series B funding round led by Sky9 Capital with participation from Atypical Ventures and Olive Technology Ventures, as well as previous investors. This round will accelerate the development of the company’s AI-native database, expand go-to-market efforts, and strengthen governance in a regulated industry.
“Today’s agent landscape is rapidly moving from planning and prototyping to full-scale operation of mission-critical tasks such as servicing customers, managing supply chains, and driving internal workflows. They’re flocking to their systems with questions they didn’t anticipate when they designed it, requiring them to analyze live data, historical records, and multiple systems at once, putting a strain on their existing data stacks. level provides a faster and more efficient way to process these workloads at scale,” said Rick Underwood, President of PhoenixAI.
Underwood leads PhoenixAI’s market development and operations. Previously, he was CEO of Clumio (acquired by Commvault) and senior go-to-market leader at Snowflake until its 2020 IPO.
Enterprise demand for infrastructure purpose-built for AI agents is accelerating. Agents run different queries than humans. Agents operate in real-time and ask unpredictable questions that cannot be handled by historical analytics stacks. As a result, answering agent questions requires combining live and historical data on the fly in ways that traditional databases were not designed to support. Traditional databases got around that work by requiring teams to pre-model and restructure the data for each “expected” question a human user might ask, but this approach breaks down the moment agents start asking new questions at scale.
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Market-leading companies such as AppLovin, Coinbase, Conductor, and Demandbase are already running PhoenixAI in production and are realizing the strategic benefits it brings.
“PhoenixAI has changed the equation. Streaming updates from Kafka can be queried within seconds, analysts get sub-second responses on normalized live data, and AI agents operate on the same real-time datasets. This level of performance at scale fundamentally changes what data teams can do.”
— Xinyu Liu, Coinbase Senior Staff Software Engineer
“PhoenixAI now delivers its workloads as a real-time analytics database on a data lakehouse. Production queries that scan hundreds of millions of rows return in less than a second. This is the architecture needed for next-generation agent workloads.”
— Wei Zheng, Chief Product Officer, Conductor
“PhoenixAI provides a fast, independent warehouse to process agent workloads directly on Apache Iceberg tables, and the optimizer automatically handles new joins.”
— Ryan Nowacoski, Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platforms, Demand Base
Sky9 Capital is a global venture firm focused on AI, fintech, and deep technology, and has backed frontier AI leaders such as Kimi maker Moonshot AI and self-driving company WeRide. Sky9 currently holds the lead in PhoenixAI’s Series B round.
“The transition to agent AI is one of the biggest infrastructure changes we’ve ever seen, and databases are at the heart of it. Enterprises can’t put agents into production until they can deliver live data at the speed and scale that agents demand today. That’s what PhoenixAI is all about. “We are proud to lead this round and support this category-defining company.” Founder and Managing Partner of Sky9 Capital.
