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Redis Labs Raises $100M
- data_ders 6y agonewb here -- why would a developer pay for Redis? i.e. "Redis Enterprise"?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- WJW 6y agoThere 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 6y agoCheck this out: https://redislabs.com/redis-enterprise/advantages/ 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 6y agoIf an external contributor were to bring such features to the open source redis, would they refuse it?
- rad_gruchalski 6y agoMost likely.
- darkhorse13 6y agoProbably won't be able to refuse it outright. Though It's unlikely that an external contributor would be able to bring these features in easily. Redis Labs has a lot of people working on their enterprise offering.
- ruffrey 6y agoRedis has sentinel and scaling features, as well as established patterns. Enterprises are likely willing to pay for experience of doing it right, reliably.
- ssalazar 6y agoNot all of the value they provide can be replaced by a pull request. That said, theres equal if not greater motivation for this hypothetical contributor to raise their own $100mm and compete with Redis Labs.
- pm90 6y agoDevelopers may not, enterprises might.
- mtnGoat 6y agoI've often wondered the same thing.
- omginternets 6y agoIt'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-system 6y agoYep, 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.
- vanviegen 6y agoAnd of course, as we all know, you'll never spend any time troubleshooting proprietary solutions.
- kube-system 6y agoI’m not saying that proprietary software doesn’t have support costs. I am saying that source code licenses are irrelevant to support and operations costs. Both RedHat and Microsoft will sell you a support contract.
- kawsper 6y agoThey are experts in running a Redis cluster, and you can leave the complexities to them.
- tnolet 6y agoThe "user" and the "customer" are pretty different for these kinda things.
- hashamali 6y agoActive active geo-distribution, for one. If you want globally distributed consistent clusters, enterprise makes it possible through their CRDT based enterprise-only option.
- dominotw 6y agoIs this really common to have a geo replicated redis. My impression was the geo replication is usually done at db level not at cache.
- pjam 6y agoRedis _can_ be used as a cache, but it's not the only use case. I've personally mostly used it as a message broker (celery in python, resque in ruby), but it can definitely be used as a database. Bottom line, it's a very flexible tool, and can be more than "just a cache".
- dominotw 6y agoSure but most people are using it as a cache. Their valuation reflects its use as a cache. > I've personally mostly used it as a message broker Did you geo replicate message broker?
- pjam 6y ago> most people are using it as a cache Maybe, I actually have no idea, have you seen numbers? > Their valuation reflects its use as a cache How so? > Did you geo replicate message broker? No
- jamesblonde 6y agoIt may not be just a cache, but please, it is not a database. A database should guarantee data consistency, integrity, and ideally availability. ACID + HA. Redis does not do these. It is fast because it doesn't worry about the niceties of concurrency models and isolation models and recovery models and agreement protocols. And you can use it as a database as a very large clothing retailer I know did as an online feature store. However, it crashed on black friday due to overload and there was a massive revenue shortage because the ML models that should have been using it to retrieve features were going bananas. It was a case of misuse by said company - it should not be used for mission critical HA persistent data infra, IMHO.
- ximeng 6y agoSeems 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-series-e-funding-round-for-database-platform/ https://ciotechie.com/news/redis-labs-gets-usd60-million-in-...
- tyre 6y agowow 60 at 146 is awful. This company must be almost entirely owned by VC at this point.
- asaddhamani 6y agoAnd by the way it's worded, I assume 146 is post-money.
- echelon 6y agoI'm still learning all of these investment terms. If the 146M is post-money, then they own (60/146M)%? If it's pre-money, (60/(60+146M))%?
- mikepurvis 6y agoYes, that is correct.
- TuringNYC 6y agoThey are not VCs, they are a Private Equity firm: https://www.franciscopartners.com/about 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 6y agoI hope antirez has equity in it
- echelon 6y agoIf 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.
- skrebbel 6y agoHe 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TuringNYC 6y agoArent 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.
- skrtskrt 6y agoThis is what GPL covers I believe? I want to be sure, but a lot of OSS license explainer sites I see aren’t super clear.
- leptoniscool 6y agoSeems over priced.. A small team can make something similar in a few weeks?
- sushshshsh 6y agoCan even just fork it and run everything in bitcoin and gold ^.^
- cbg0 6y 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 6y agoThis comment is HN distilled.
- hodgesrm 6y agoMuch/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 6y agoThat is a lot of money to raise for an established technology. Sounds like they might be standing up their own cloud?
- nostrademons 6y agoFor 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 6y agoSo 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 6y agoWith 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.
- ttul 6y agoA 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.
- dvirsky 6y agoBeing 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.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoAm 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 6y agoThe 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 6y agoI'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/ 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/ https://keydb.dev/
- pkulak 6y ago> key value I see what you did there.
- arrow7000 6y ago> key value I see what you did there
- hinkley 6y agoProbably 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.
- ttul 6y agoRedis 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 6y agoRight, but isn't RedisLabs screwed now that AWS has packaged Redis open source into an AWS service that is cheaper?
- dec0dedab0de 6y agoBain 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?
- smt88 6y agoYou're not being paranoid. There are few examples of PE firms running a company in a product-focused way that delights consumers.
- enahs-sf 6y agoPE 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.
- smt88 6y agoThere's a massive, influential economic ideology centered around the idea that "beholden to the bottom line" and "better for the end user" are the same goal. I was amused that you assume the opposite (as do I). The exception to your rule that I'll mention is that sometimes PE firms will buy a company and reopen it after it stops operating, but that's pretty rare.
- skrebbel 6y agoMaybe that's just confirmation bias though? Ie the PE-owned well-run companies don't make the news? I know one example: NXP Semiconductors. Got spun out of Philips, along with all the Philips cultural baggage (which means high bureaucracy and low productivity). A PE firm bought it, kept yelling about the bottom line for years on end, and everybody started cutting away waste, ineffective people (the "human furniture") got fired, prestige projects that had no economic value got killed, and they started shipping. I'm sure it's not all been roses and sunshine but last I checked, NXP is a better company than when they were a part of Philips.
- simonebrunozzi 6y 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-sanfilippo-antirez-joins-redis-labs https://redislabs.com/press/redis-creator-salvatore-sanfilip...
- cnst 6y agoI think Salvatore Sanfilippo left the whole of Redis, not Redis Labs specifically. http://antirez.com/news/133 http://antirez.com/news/133 -- The end of the Redis adventure
- reilly3000 6y agoCongrats 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 6y agoHappy to see money going where it's deserved.
- bionhoward 6y agoWould 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)