MariaDB Drafts Top Financial Talent Ahead of Becoming a Public Company
Veterans in finance and operations recruited to CFO and new board position to support MariaDB's next phase of growth
MariaDB® Corporation today announced the appointment of Christine Napoli as chief financial officer, and Christine Russell as a new board member.
The appointments come at a pivotal time for the company, which reported 42% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the six-month period that ended March 31, 2022, compared to the same period last year. In this period of time, MariaDB has grown over four times the market forecasted growth of the relational database market, which IDC forecasts as growing by a 9.6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the period between 2020 and 2025 (IDC, "Worldwide Database Management Systems Software Forecast," 2021-2025, US48224421, September 2021).
As companies modernize and move to the cloud, MariaDB database products free customers from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases. The company has a fast-growing customer base with well over 600 customers in over 60 countries across industries such as financial services, telecommunications, retail, technology, public sector and education.
"As we scale MariaDB, it's critical that we have a team with the experience and expertise to implement the financial controls and operations expected from publicly traded companies," said Michael Howard, CEO at MariaDB Corporation. "Ms. Napoli and Ms. Russell have both led brilliant careers in finance and have the experience to lead us in the times ahead. With these two new leaders, we are well-positioned as we continue our transition to the public spotlight."
"There is a renaissance happening in the database industry," said Napoli, CFO at MariaDB Corporation. "With the need to be data-driven, as was evident during my time in the media industry, databases, which are the backbone of applications, must be ultra-resilient and must support massive scale. MariaDB is clearly in a leading position with its new generation database technology, and I'm excited to be part of the team that will support its growth and operations."
Napoli joins MariaDB from Peacock, NBCUniversal's streaming service, where she was CFO. While at Peacock, she was a key leader since its inception, helping to grow the business to 28 million monthly active accounts in a two-year period and well over $700 million in fiscal year revenue. She is a seasoned executive with vast operational and financial experience across a multitude of NBCUniversal business units. Previously, she worked at Price Waterhouse LLP (now PwC) as a public auditor in the financial services sector.
Russell is currently on the board of directors and chair of the audit committee at three publicly traded technology companies including AXT, Inc., eGain Corporation and QuickLogic Corporation, as well as several private companies including iCoin Technology and the Silicon Valley Directors' Exchange. She was previously CFO at six publicly traded companies including PDF Solutions, UniPixel, Inc., Virage Logic Corporation, Ceva, Inc., Persistence Software Inc. and Valence Technologies, Inc. as well as two private equity-backed firms and four venture capital-backed companies. She has completed successful IPOs and follow-on equity offerings raising over $200 million.
"MariaDB is on the fast-track to be a wildly successful company," said Russell, board member at MariaDB Corporation. "Very few companies are positioned as well as MariaDB to take on the $40 billion relational database industry and help customers transition from proprietary databases to open source and the cloud. I look forward to working closely with the rest of the board and executives to capitalize on this incredible market opportunity."
Additional Resources
- Explore MariaDB database products
- Get started in the cloud on MariaDB SkySQL
- Visit mariadb.com
- Follow @mariadb on Twitter
- Read MariaDB's blog
- Earlier this year MariaDB announced the intent to become a publicly traded company via combination with Angel Pond Holdings Corporation (NYSE:POND). To learn more, go to https://mariadb.com/IPO.
About MariaDB
MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it's one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB™.
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