PhoenixAI, phoenixdata.ai, has raised $80M in Series B funding led by Sky9 Capital. The company provides the Agentic AI Database delivering sub-second SQL access to unified real-time and historical enterprise data for autonomous AI agents, with enterprise governance. The capital will scale infrastructure supporting production agent workloads.
Agentic AI Funding Wave Accelerates
The timing comes amid accelerating investment in specialized AI data platforms: Spade announced a $40M Series B in May 2026. PhoenixAI's approach focuses on sub-second responses for unpredictable agent queries with governance, addressing gaps in broader platforms.
Agent Queries Break Traditional Stacks
AI agents generate thousands of unplanned, real-time queries that traditional warehouses struggle to handle at scale. Customers report requirements like 573B+ rows processed with sub-second latency at Coinbase and 100k+ events per second with under 4s freshness at Intuit. Existing solutions often force tradeoffs between performance, data freshness, and compliance controls.
Built for Agent-Scale Concurrency
PhoenixAI unifies real-time streaming ingestion with historical analytics in one engine, supporting native Iceberg, Kafka, and Flink integration without data copies. It adds agent-specific features including row-level security, audit logging, and the Agent Fawkes copilot for natural language queries. This differs from Databricks' broader lakehouse approach or ClickHouse's general OLAP focus by optimizing specifically for autonomous agent patterns and high concurrency.
"AI agents don't query data the way humans do."
Sky9 Leads Strategic AI Bet
Sky9 Capital led the round with a focus on AI infrastructure, bringing experience from ByteDance and TikTok ecosystem investments plus recent bets in Kimi and Sentient. Atypical Ventures and Olive Technology Ventures also participated, signaling conviction in the technical depth of the rebranded platform formerly known as CelerData.
Agentic AI Market Expands Rapidly
The agentic AI market is projected to grow from $10.9B in 2026 to $182.9B by 2033 at a 49.6% CAGR. Competitors include Databricks at $20.2B raised and Imply at roughly $215M. PhoenixAI positions itself in the convergence of real-time analytics and agentic workloads, where demand for live data access at agent scale is rising.
Ex-Snowflake Executive Joins Leadership
Rick Underwood, formerly of Clumio and Snowflake, joined as President to guide the agentic pivot. His experience aligns with scaling data infrastructure for enterprise production use.
Market Timing Validates Pivot
The raise follows immediately after the May 2026 rebrand and product launches including the MCP Connector for Claude and Smarter Scaling for bursty workloads. Production deployments at companies like Fanatics and Conductor demonstrate traction with metrics such as 6 PB migrated and 90% cost reduction.