Database company Couchbase Inc. beat expectations today thanks to solid revenue growth, but it offered light guidance for the coming quarter that sent its stock down after-hours.

The company reported a wider loss for the first quarter of $21.8 million, compared with a loss of $19.8 million one year earlier. Its loss per share before certain costs such as stock compensation came to 27 cents, beating Wall Street’s consensus estimate of a 32-cent-per-share loss. Revenue rose by 18% from a year earlier, to $40.9 million, just ahead of Wall Street’s $39.7 million target.

Chairman and Chief Executive Matt Cain (pictured) said he was pleased with the company’s results, as they exceeded its own guidance on all metrics, touting “the progress our team is making on our commitment to drive continued growth, increase Capella adoption, improve sales and marketing efficiency.”

Couchbase is the company behind the popular Couchbase NoSQL database, which is used by enterprises to power complex business applications. Unlike traditional databases such as Oracle, which can only handle one type of data, Couchbase can process both structured and unstructured data at the same time, making it much more flexible.

In particular, this ability to handle multiple types of data enables Couchbase to act as a data cache. As such, enterprises can use one system to accomplish what traditionally would have required three separate systems.

The company has put a lot of emphasis on its Couchbase Capella “database-as-a-service” in recent months. Capella is a cloud-hosted version of Couchbase that’s now available on all three major public cloud platforms — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Capella seems to be growing well, with Couchbase reporting that its subscription revenue grew by 21% during the quarter, to $38.5 million, making up the vast majority of its sales. A better indicator of Capella’s growth might be Couchbase’s annual recurring revenue, which rose 23%, to $172.2 million.

That’s decent growth, but the market was apparently more concerned with Couchbase’s immediate future prospects, which don’t appear to be as great. For the second quarter, it forecast revenue of between $41.2 million and $41.8 million, below Wall Street’s consensus of $43.3 million. For the full year, the company is calling for sales of $171.7 million to $174.7 million, the midpoint of that range below Wall Street’s estimate of $173.4 million.

Investors voted with their feet, and Couchbase’s stock fell more than 17% in after-hours trading. Even, Couchbase remains one of the best-performing technology stocks of the year so far, with its shares up more than 63% in the year to date.

Photo: Couchbase