Redis Labs Raises $100M

https://redislabs.com/press/redis-labs-raises-100-million-series-f-financing/

by davidgl • 6 years ago

156 107 6 years ago

data_ders• 6 years ago

newb here -- why would a developer pay for Redis? i.e. "Redis Enterprise"?

WJW• 6 years ago

There are proprietary modules like full text search that you might be interested in using. Also, perhaps you want/need dedicated tech support beyond what stack overflow will give you.

maxmalysh• 6 years ago

Check this out:

https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/advantages/

Redis Enterprise is a robust in-memory database platform built by the people who develop open source Redis. It maintains the simplicity and high performance of Redis, while adding many enterprise-grade capabilities, such as linear scaling to hundreds of millions of operations per second, Active-Active geo-replication with local latency, Redis on Flash to tier data across dynamic and persistent memory and solid-state disk (SSD) to reduce total cost of ownership, and five-nines (99.999%) uptime based on built-in durability and single-digit-seconds failover. Redis Enterprise supports many data modeling methods with modules such as RediSearch, RedisJSON, RedisGraph, RedisTimeSeries, RedisBloom, and RedisAI, and allows operations to be executed across and between modules and core Redis functionality using RedisGears, a serverless engine that runs across shards and nodes of Redis Enterprise cluster. All this while keeping database latency under one millisecond, so your application can respond instantaneously. Learn how to implement the best in-memory database: Redis Enterprise.

The_rationalist• 6 years ago

If an external contributor were to bring such features to the open source redis, would they refuse it?

pm90• 6 years ago

Developers may not, enterprises might.

mtnGoat• 6 years ago

I've often wondered the same thing.

omginternets• 6 years ago

It's not the developers per se that are paying. It's their employer, i.e.: large companies who want things like

- professional support

- proprietary modules for Redis

- advice on integrating Redis into their legacy systems

kube-system2• 6 years ago

Yep, open-source is 'free' as in puppy. The TCO of open source software is not zero. It's just that some people are willing to absorb those external costs.

When I, as a developer, have an issue with some open source code, I spend some amount of time fixing it (labor cost), and some amount of time with a broken system (downtime). But it's not a big deal for me, if I spend 30 minutes troubleshooting a problem. Scale that up to a company with thousands of employees, and those can be big costs.

kawsper• 6 years ago

They are experts in running a Redis cluster, and you can leave the complexities to them.

tnolet• 6 years ago

The "user" and the "customer" are pretty different for these kinda things.

hashamali2• 6 years ago

Active active geo-distribution, for one. If you want globally distributed consistent clusters, enterprise makes it possible through their CRDT based enterprise-only option.

dominotw2• 6 years ago

Is this really common to have a geo replicated redis. My impression was the geo replication is usually done at db level not at cache.

ximeng• 6 years ago

Seems a big jump in valuation (1bn) from previous round.

“Redis Labs, the provider of a database management system, has raised USD60 million in Series E funding round to accelerate the delivery of the most efficient database to the world. The funding was led by Francisco Partners, a leading private equity firm. With this funding round, Redis Labs’ valuation has now reached USD146 million.” - https://ciotechie.com/news/redis-labs-gets-usd60-million-in-...

tyre• 6 years ago

wow 60 at 146 is awful. This company must be almost entirely owned by VC at this point.

asaddhamani• 6 years ago

And by the way it's worded, I assume 146 is post-money.

TuringNYC2• 6 years ago

They are not VCs, they are a Private Equity firm: https://www.franciscopartners.com/about

PE investments are very different. They are probably going to either slim/trim or focus on some core money-making part of the business and then sell/breakup/flip the business in a couple of years. The portfolio stats are totally different from VC.

bra-ket• 6 years ago

I hope antirez has equity in it

echelon2• 6 years ago

If he doesn't, then I'm disgusted.

The fact that cloud providers are built on repackaging open source solutions and that the authors have no equity is one of my biggest disappointments in the modern tech world.

My feelings are made worse by the fact that we seem to be building more walled gardens, forgetting the original intent and ethos of the web.

It's wealth for the few on the backs of free labor provided by our best luminaries.

And then they don't give us the keys. We have to pay rent.

Ugh, I hate it so much.

We need stronger copyleft. And we need to stop contributing our time and resources to open source that isn't equitable to the authors.

skrebbel2• 6 years ago

He worked for Redis Labs for many years. I'm sure they have a good understanding.

To be honest, your comment reads as if you think building a company such as Redis Labs is easy. Even with a tool like Redis freely available, it's hard and risky.

I understand the sentiment better with eg Amazon taking some open source, putting a sticker on it, and using their market dominance to extract free money from it. But that's not what Redis Labs is at all.

TuringNYC2• 6 years ago

Arent there OSS license types that disallow commercial forks and/or service businesses? I'm assuming if someone chose a license that allows for commercial activity, they want it to happen.

bananabreakfast• 6 years ago

Antirez very consciously and specifically chose the BSD license for Redis with the exact expectation that companies will be more likely to contribute back to upstream if they are adopting and improving it without a legal stranglehold requiring them to do so.

Maybe he has equity, maybe not. I hope he does. But a company profiting off of Redis without contributing back is a very conscious choice by the author and not at all the fault of weak copyright enforcement.

driverdan• 6 years ago

I don't understand this argument. Hosting providers are providing... hosting. I don't see how the tools they host on their platform (eg redis) is relevant.

If they didn't offer automatically provisioned tools users would still use those tools, they'd have to set them up manually or using their own automation.

hinkley3• 6 years ago

A lot of people didn't want Richard Stallman to be right (either him specifically, or the GNU ethos he espoused). But damnit, he told me so.

I really love the BSD concept, but on a dark night when I'm feeling morose, I wonder if the way my thoughts on public policy are skewed, in the same way that we say that people who vote for taxes on themselves suffer from a delusion of being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires'.

I want the option to build myself a business out of Open Software, even though it looks now like I may only do that once in my lifetime. But so do a lot of people who are much, much more selfish than I am.

xwdv• 6 years ago

This is the point of open source.

rederp• 6 years ago

You're basing this whole rant on an assumption that he doesn't, that is not supported by any fact. The dude worked for Redis Labs for years, and was listed on the executive page of their website alongside the founders, and he now retired and assigned control over the project to the company. Does he strike you as a person who would agree to that without getting his share?

leetrout• 6 years ago

https://redislabs.com/blog/thank-you-salvatore-sanfilippo/

I’m not sure if he does. That post is interesting - I didn’t know he was stepping away.

OJFord2• 6 years ago

Not totally away:

So, dear Redis community, today I’m stepping back as the Redis maintainer. My new position will be, on one side, an “ideas” person at Redis Labs, in order to provide inputs for new Redis possibilities: I’ll continue to be part of the Redis Labs advisory board.

http://antirez.com/news/133

bhouston• 6 years ago

He likely has some as he was there for a number of years -- 5 I believe. But he didn't start the company. So I would guess much less than 5%, if not less than 1%.

TheGrassyKnoll• 6 years ago

Well, 1% of a $billion is $10 million. I think I could get by on that.

mrfox321• 6 years ago

I am thinking he stands to benefit, else he would comment in this thread.

Maybe I am wrong to jump to this conclusion, though.

leptoniscool• 6 years ago

Seems over priced.. A small team can make something similar in a few weeks?

sushshshsh• 6 years ago

Can even just fork it and run everything in bitcoin and gold ^.^

cbg0• 6 years ago

A small team can make something similar in a few weeks?

You can say that about a lot of products on the market, and yet this magical team never rears its head.

lovegoblin• 6 years ago

This comment is HN distilled.

tluyben2• 6 years ago

I did not read it for a while. But maybe I automatically read over it.

karolist• 6 years ago

Reminded me of the (in)famous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

hodgesrm• 6 years ago

Much/most of the cost in big open source businesses is not creating the product but marketing and sales. Engineering is smaller but not trivial either if you are operating at scale in a large market. The people who actually pay money for these things expect them to work and to meet enterprise requirements like SOC2.

jugg1es• 6 years ago

That is a lot of money to raise for an established technology. Sounds like they might be standing up their own cloud?

nostrademons• 6 years ago

For B2B startups the large amount of capital raised usually goes mostly to sales & marketing. The calculus usually goes something like this:

"I've got an existing product that I know enterprises want to buy. For every $50K I put into consultative sales, I'll sign a client whose LTV is $500K. Therefore, if I raise $100M for 10% of the company, I can hire more salespeople, increase the future earnings of the company by $1B, and hence all our existing shareholders will be better off and so will the new investor." Repeat until the target market is saturated, which for software startups can be a long way off.

This is why SaaS startups usually run at negative profits, even after they go public, and yet the majority of public investors still continually undervalue them (as in their value goes up over time). You have a machine where you put in $X and get back $5-10X over time, but the time period is usually many years. It makes sense to feed the machine with as much $$ as you have, and oftentimes some $$ that you don't have.

Ericson2314• 6 years ago

So a small company making some software is now transformed into another b2b huckster leech on the fat pigs that are the fortune 500 rent seekers?

Ugh, this economy.

jnwatson• 6 years ago

With all this free money floating around, it feels nice that some of it landed on good people.

That said, being overcapitalized is perniciously corrupting. I saw first hand what happens when there's too much money floating inside a company. Malinvestment is an issue at the company level just as much as at the macroeconomic level.

Management starts acting like trust fund kids, forgetting that, one day, the money might run out, and making a profit is the only sustainable way to run a company.

ttul5• 6 years ago

A billion dollar valuation implies billion dollar expectations. They must surely be well on their way to $100M ARR in order to attain a valuation this high - and likely at 100% annual growth rates. I'd say congratulations are in order.

As much as there are examples from history of companies that have blown venture capital on stupid things, I think Redis Labs has a good shot at reaching the holy grail of an IPO.

dvirsky3• 6 years ago

Being a former Redis Labs employee (disclaimer: I own a few shares), I can attest that their leadership has a scrappy ethos and this is a company that doesn't waste money on stupid things.

simonebrunozzi2• 6 years ago

I doubt you need to be close to $100MM in ARR to raise at this valuation, given the current state of affairs.

My guess is that fast growth + $35-40MM in current ARR should have sufficed.

Just my 0.02.

hitekker2• 6 years ago

I think the root of overcapitalization is fear. People who can't face their fears, will look for ways to run away from their fears.

For a founder, that way is runway. The founder who is terrified about the company's future, will raise a lot of money to not think about that future. Money buys them time and time buys them distance. A clean, safe separation from reality where unpleasant voices like "do we have product market fit?" or "is our moat large enough?" can be ignored or saved for "later". A "later" that seems further and further away depending on the money raised.

Overcapitalization, in that sense, is meant as a security blanket, not a safety net. In that sense, the complacency and eventual corruption of the organization derives from the need for safety that executives and their managers subconsciously & naturally prioritize above all else.

On that note, I'm curious how Slack will fare over the next few years.

danenania• 6 years ago

I don’t think it’s (generally) a question of “product-market fit” when raising $100M. It’s a question of “product-market domination”.

It’s not a bet that the product will be profitable and successful—that should be a given. It’s a bet on the company becoming the leader in a huge market.

That said, your larger point still holds :) And of course raising the stakes this way can also increase the risk of ruin.

nine_k• 6 years ago

OK, I suppose they are on the exit line now. I wonder who the buyer is going to eventually be. I can't imagine an IPO, though; maybe my imagination is weak.

xchaotic2• 6 years ago

In the broader market there’s still hype for SaaS businesses which Redis can easily become because everyone wants to be a rentier and earn passive income.

trhway• 6 years ago

Raising today 100M you'd want to at least, worst case, triple the exit valuation, and so you grow as crazy your enterprise sales for the next year or two so your 15x ARR gets to $3-4B and you sell for $6B+ and let the buyer carry all that support and tech debt.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 6 years ago

Am I the only person that gets worried when a great open source project gets a lot of VC money?

Without VC funding, an open source project is a success if it is useful to the devs and provides a comfortable income to the maintainers. Basically, a "lifestyle" business.

With VC funding, the goal now becomes generating huge returns or failing fast, which is fundamentally at odds with a good open source project. Thus the pressure comes to either aggressively monetize the project, or else to get it acquired by someone.

neurostimulant• 6 years ago

The investor is not a VC though, but a private equity firm, which is probably even worse? I hope this won't negatively affect the future of the open source version.

redm• 6 years ago

I'm curious what the key value Redis Labs is bringing that justifies so much money (other than a sales team, support, and other minor changes to Redis). In other words, what key tech are they adding? The page dedicated to the software is really generic:

https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise-software/overview/

I started using KeyDB and the project is great. I'm more inclined to support the tech they are integrating that check things off my Redis wishlist such as Active-Active replication and true multi-core support (not just IO treads).

https://keydb.dev/

pkulak• 6 years ago

key value

I see what you did there.

arrow7000• 6 years ago

key value

I see what you did there

hinkley3• 6 years ago

Probably the professional services part.

They will probably spend this money on consolidation. Buying up people who provide complementary tools or extensions, maybe a couple that were previously agnostic.

ttul5• 6 years ago

Redis is in the same position as many other companies in the open source tools space that have also done well: Grafana Labs also comes to mind. When large enterprise and government clients want to use open source infrastructure like Redis, they invariably have a myriad of requirements that aren't obvious to anyone who doesn't work at that scale. They are willing to pay a lot of money to solve these enterprise scale problems even though the underlying engine is open source, since building the tools to do so themselves would easily cost even more.

likeabbas• 6 years ago

Right, but isn't RedisLabs screwed now that AWS has packaged Redis open source into an AWS service that is cheaper?

henryfjordan2• 6 years ago

Redis Labs developed all the modules (RedisSearch, RedisGraph, etc). Those are all licensed in such a way that Amazon cannot rehost them.

seibelj• 6 years ago

And anyone who says that's wrong to do is very disingenuous. That is a very legitimate business model, and IMO the only way to compete with AWS as an open source product.

devmunchies• 6 years ago

are all licensed in such a way that Amazon cannot rehost them

You mean in such a way that Amazon cannot "productize" them, right? Surely you can host them on AWS if you're setting it up yourself.

sitkack• 6 years ago

I can see why folks would migrate from Redis to KeyDB as it is Redis protocol compatible.

Did you look at Aerospike? It has transactions, persistence, replication and is fault tolerant.

https://github.com/aerospike/aerospike-server

dec0dedab0de• 6 years ago

Bain Capital, aren't they the ones that sunk toys-r-us? Along with antirez stepping down, I'm nervous about the future of redis. Am I just being paranoid?

smt882• 6 years ago

You're not being paranoid. There are few examples of PE firms running a company in a product-focused way that delights consumers.

enahs-sf• 6 years ago

PE firms are beholden to the bottom line. I can't think of one instance where PE bought a company and it got better for the end user.

simonebrunozzi2• 6 years ago

... As the home of Redis, the most popular open source database, we provide a competitive edge to global businesses with Redis Enterprise, which delivers...
Redis Labs - home of Redis [logo and motto]

I like Redis Labs, but: this wording is misleading and inaccurate.

@antirez (Salvatore Sanfilippo), the creator of Redis, joined them in 2015 [0]; however, he left recently. That's the only claim they can use to somehow be seen as the "home" of Redis, but it is still a very weird claim.

What's the home of an open source project?

My personal perception is that they shouldn't word things this way; I might be mistaken, or at least other people might see it differently. What's your take?

Again, to be clear: I have nothing against the company - I actually like and admire them and @antirez. I just don't want them to get down the rabbit hole of corporate jargon and marketing BS (see what happened with New Relic, as an example).

[0] https://redislabs.com/press/redis-creator-salvatore-sanfilip...

cnst• 6 years ago

I think Salvatore Sanfilippo left the whole of Redis, not Redis Labs specifically.

http://antirez.com/news/133 -- The end of the Redis adventure

reilly3000• 6 years ago

Congrats to the Redis Labs team!

I'm really intrigued by the concept of a multimode database. I'd love to hear from anybody who is doing this in practice. I run a document, sql, and graph db strung together with pub/sub. All in one definitely seems appealing but I'm trying to size up downsides, what migration work would be needed, and what integrations may break (especially SQL).

jbirer• 6 years ago

Happy to see money going where it's deserved.

bionhoward• 6 years ago

Would it be possible to add autoscaling RedisGraph and other modules in the affordable part of Redis enterprise? The RSAL license terms prevent anybody from really using the modules and the alternative is thousands of dollars, which is nuts to evaluate early stage software.

I’m not sure why Redis Enterprise needs so many different price levels. If Redis were priced like DynamoDB, there would be much less friction for folks like me to sign up. Right now it’s like all the other cloud database companies: want to use our database? Great! Calculate your storage needs in advance and convert that into our measure of choice (different for each provider)

Redis Labs Raises $100M

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