The Chinese e-commerce giant has agreed to lead a €22.9 million ($27 million) investment in MariaDB, the European company behind one of the web’s most popular open source database servers, according to a source with knowledge of negotiations.
Formerly known as SkySQL, MariaDB is attractive to Alibaba due to its presence in the industry. It has offices in Sweden and the U.S. and claims around 12 million global users of its databases, with some of the larger names including Booking.com, HP, Virgin Mobile and Wikipedia.