Database company Redis Labs has raised $110 million in Series G funding, bringing in a range of new investors including Softbank's Vision Fund in a raise that valued the company at over $2 billion -- doubling its valuation in less than a year since its $100 million Series F took it to unicorn status for the first time.
Redis Labs provides a range of enterprise offerings built on the in-memory database it built, which offer linear scaling to hundreds of millions of operations per second and five-nines (99.999%) uptime with single-digit-seconds failover. (It's fast: last time we checked in Redis on Flash and Intel NVMe delivered three million operations per second; while full ACID transactions on an EMC VMAX all flash storage array hit 660K ops/sec on the standard 1:1 read/write use case with 100B item_size; 640K op/sec for write-intensive use).
The funding round was led by a new investor, Tiger Global, and included participation from another new investor, Softbank Vision Fund 2, with existing Redis Labs investor TCV. Tiger, Softbank, and TCV took additional ownership as part of a $200 million secondary transaction, Redis Labs said in a release April 7.
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“Companies are increasingly looking for ways to leverage the efficiency and flexibility of the cloud to drive their business forward and Redis Labs is the best partner for them in this journey,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global Management. “Redis Labs has developed a real-time data platform to solve for low-latency requirements of business-critical applications and the go-to-market strategy to succeed alongside the cloud hyperscalers.”
Redis Labs currently names 8,000 customers, including more than two thirds of Fortune 10, along with brands like MasterCard, Dell, Fiserv, Microsoft, and Groupon and has been named as the world’s “Most Loved Database” by developers for four consecutive years in Stack Overflow’s annual developer survey. It has faced all the challenges of companies built on open source however, from companies deciding to self-serve, to hyperscale cloud providers rolling out their own managed services and a challenge to differentiate its offering in a crowded market.
A quick refresher: for most apps there exists a database and a cache. Each time data is needed from the database, the application has to do, as Redis puts it, “a short choreographed dance” of four steps: 1) Ask the cache for the data; 2) If the cache doesn’t have the data, ask for the data from the database; 3) Take that data from the database and populate it into the cache; 4) Get a reply from the cache.
This four-step shuffle adds complications in terms of application logic, connections between multiple services, and multiple potential points of failure, but is needed to make up for slow-reacting databases. Redis Labs is growing in part by persuading businesses to start using it as a database as well as the in-memory caching service; it cites a net customer retention rate of 120% its release for the Series G.
The raise comes as Reds Labs recently saw its Redis Enterprise-powered tiers on Azure Cache for Redis go GA and follows its release of RediSearch 2.0, which enables users to build modern app with interactive search experiences. This funding round means Redis Labs has now raised a net amount of $347 million.
“As workloads increasingly move to the cloud, we believe Redis Labs is a leader who is transforming the database market. With a strong foundation with developers and in AI applications, Redis has become a critical component for global enterprises to compete in the digital economy,'' said Softbank partner Vikas Parekh.
Gopi Vaddi, General Partner at TCV added: “We’re not only excited about the role Redis is playing as a real-time data platform in the cloud, but the fast-growing opportunity to help companies make greater use of intelligence to make better business decisions and create new customer experiences through data.”
