Graph database reinvented: Dgraph secures $11.5M to pursue its unique and opinionated path

If you were an investor, would you give a mid-sized startup comprised fully of engineers and sporting an open source product $11.5 million to pursue a singular path amidst heavy competition? Though we can relate to how all-engineer teams can get tons of work done in a no-fluff-just-stuff way, there is an obvious problem with that approach: how will people in the enterprise get to buy your toy without sales, marketing and the like? Jain did mention the goal is to ramp up the team and build a repeatable sales process, but the hard-core developer-centric approach wont change. At this point, though there are Startup and Enterprise versions of the open source software, theres not much difference in terms of features, except (crucially) support and cluster size. Dgraph boasts "low-latency arbitrary-depth joins and traversals, Jepsen tested distributed transactions, data sharding and synchronous replication support and a flexible schema".