Redis Labs Gains VC Funding, New Enterprise Customers

While the pace of venture capital investment in technology startups declined during the first half of this year, some analytics and database companies are reporting continuing and expanding investments.

Among them is Redis Labs Inc., which this week disclosed a $14 million funding round at what it claimed was a “significantly increased valuation.” Bain Capital and Carmel Ventures led the Series C round along with other unidentified existing investors. Redis Labs, Mountain View, Calif., said Thursday (July 21) it would use the funding to expand its global customer base.

The database vendor also used the funding announcement to tout revenue growth for its Redis Labs Enterprise Cluster software used for on-premise enterprise deployments. The company announced a 350-percent increase in cluster software revenue over the same period last year. It also claimed about 600 new enterprise customers in the first half of 2016.

The NoSQL database vendor founded in 2011 also claims more than 6,200 enterprise customers that include Groupon, TD Bank and Verizon. Meanwhile, its cloud service exceeds 55,000 accounts, the company said.

At least some of that growth is attributed to its integration with Spark SQL via a Spark-Redis connector. The integration announced in February is said to deliver a more than 100-fold increase in Spark processing performance on Redis as a data store. The Spark-Redis connector package also includes a library for writing to and reading from a Redis cluster via Spark that prvides access to all if the cluster’s data structures.

Meanwhile, the database vendor has expanded partnerships to add its cluster software to Pivotal Software’s Cloud Foundry platform. It has also integrated its cloud service with Databricks, the founders of Apache Spark.

In April, Redis Labs also announced that it would partner with South Korean memory chip powerhouse Samsung Electronics (KRX: 005930) to accelerate the processing and analysis of bulging datasets using next-generation memory technology designed to significantly cut memory costs.

Those deals along with other technology partnerships announced earlier this year prompted company officials to assert that the Redis platform is among the fastest growing SQL or NoSQL database.

Salvatore Sanfilippo, the Redis creator who now oversees open source development at Redis Labs, has noted that enterprise developers have had a major impact on how the database has developed. Citing the open source ecosystem, Sanfilippo noted in a recent commentary that the focus of developers shifted from adding new features to “replication or making persistence more robust, improving high availability and making clustering available.”

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