Senior Associate General Counsel, Cockroach Labs

Maintaining full SQL compliance with global cloud capabilities will help Cockroach Labs take advantage of the wave of companies needing to scale their existing SQL databases onto the cloud. Cockroach Labs grew from a $2 billion valuation to $5 billion in under a year, proving itself as an enticing and approachable prospect in this developing sector.

It already commands a high-end raft of clients including Comcast, Bose, and Baidu - but competition is stiff, particularly with industry giants like Oracle and AWS. Its hope is that CockroachDB’s high failure tolerance and geo-distribution will provide attractively swift functionality whilst allowing customers to remain within their legal jurisdictions - and will prove pivotal in 5G use cases. Its success to date, targeted updates to ease network migrations, and its recent expansion into EMEA markets, suggest it has a strong shot.