Redis Labs raises $60 million for its NoSQL database

Redis Labs made headlines last year when it controversially changed licensing on its previously free-to-use add-on modules to the Common Clause, requiring service providers to pay for them. Today the Mountain View, California-based startup announced it has raised $60 million in series E funding. The round was led by Francisco Partners, with participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital. It follows a $44 million series D round in August 2017 and brings the company’s total capital raised to $146 million.

David Golob, chief investment officer at Francisco Partners, will join Redis’ Labs board of directors as part of the round, and operating partner Eran Gorev will come on as a board observer.

Redis CEO Ofer Bengal said the fresh funds will be used to “accelerate” Redis’ go-to-market plan and for investment in the open source Redis community. “This financing enables us to accelerate our strategy to deliver the fastest and most efficient database to the world and enable instant experiences for any modern application,” he added.

Bengal and Yiftach Schoolman, Redis’ chief technology officer, set out nearly eight years ago to build a NoSQL database platform with native data structures that could serve app requests directly from memory. Their early work — which is based on Redis (short for “Remote Dictionary Server”), an open source project implementing a distributed, in-memory key-value database with support for strings, lists, maps, sets, bitmaps, and other data structures — formed the foundation of what became Redis Enterprise, Redis’ commercial product. In addition to built-in persistence and active-active geo-distribution, the latter of which automatically handles operations on distributed app data structures, Redis Enterprise features a real-time search engine and a range of data modeling techniques, including (but not limited to) streams, machine learning, and graphs.

Italian computer software engineer Salvatore Sanfilippo, the original developer of Redis, joined Redis Labs in 2015 to lead open source development.

Bengal claims Redis’ database platform runs 1,000 times faster than disk databases and can process 10 million transactions per second in under a millisecond — faster than competing solutions like MongoDB, Apache’s Cassandra, and Couchbase. That, he says — in addition to cost savings of up to 70 percent, thanks to a tiered approach that places frequently accessed data in memory and less-commonly used files in flash storage — makes it ideal for scenarios like ingesting internet of things data and real-time analytics.

“The impact of the Redis platform is being experienced everywhere as enterprises look to modernize or build new applications,” he said.

Redis says its revenues are in the “tens of millions” and that it’s growing at 60 percent a year. More than 8,300 customers — which include American Express, Atlassian, Microsoft, Vodafone, Walmart, Dreamworks, and United Health, along with six of the Fortune 10 and 40 percent of the Fortune 100 — subscribe to its Redis Cloud service and over 250 use its on-premises Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster solution.

“Customers and partners alike tell us that Redis Labs has built the most robust and capable database solution for real-time computing across cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments,” said Matt Spetzler, partner and cohead of Francisco Partners’ Europe division. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Redis Labs’ team as the company scales up globally to meet the needs of the internet economy.”

Redis currently employs over 225 people across offices in California, London, and Tel Aviv.