Garantia Data takes in $9M in Series A funding

Steven Loeb · November 4, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/32fe

The Enterprise-class Redis Cloud provider has now reached its 1,000th paying customer

Garantia Data, provider of the enterprise-class Redis Cloud service, has raised a new round of funding, in addition to getting a new name, it was announced on Tuesday.

The company, which will be called RedisDB from now on, raised $9 million in a series A funding round. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and  Carmel Ventures, and it also included an unnamed "strategic investor," whose name could not be disclosed, Ofer Bengal, the company's co-founder and CEO, told me in an interview.

This latest round brings RedisDB's total funding to $13 million.

The money will be used for investment in research and development, meaning further development of the product, and to invest more heavily in sales and marketing.

The company is currently headquartered in Tel Aviv, but Bengal tells me that the company will be moving to Silicon Valley soon, and so it will use the money to beef up the staff in its Silicon valley office. He plans to double the number of workers there from 12 to 24 by the end of next year.

As for why the company decided to change its name, it was done to reflect the company's vision of having Redis be part of every future app.

"We did it in order to indicate our serious intentions in regards to Redis, and turning Redis into a cornerstone when it comes to building new apps when it comes to new enterprises," Bengal said.

In addition, the company also announced that Salil Deshpande of Bain Capital, and Ronen Nir of Carmel have joined the company's Board of Directors. 

Founded in March 2011, RedisDB offers NoSQL databases, which Bengal explained to me are a new type of databases, which started around 10 years ago.

"They came out as a response to limitations of traditional relational databases, such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft," Bengal said. 

Before, a company would use a single database, so the entire application or organization would use same database. This would lead to problems with big data sets. 

"The limitations happened when you started talking about big data sets. There were scalability issues, such as if the amount of data grew beyond the capacity of a single server. The performance of the database goes down dramatically."

So when the new breed of web companies started to experience these problems, they started looking for something else, a new type of database. And that was NoSQL.

With these types of databases, the same app may use 10 different databases, according to particular use case, Bengal said. Developers can even use different providers, including MongoDB and RedisDB, side by side according to the use case.

"It has seen great popularity in the last couple of years among startup companies, and now it is starting to be used by larger companies as well," said Bengal. "NoSQL is predicted to become a multibillion industry in three to five years."

There are four distinct benefits that user see from using RedisDB, according to Bengal. They are:

  • Infinite seamless scalability – with Redis datasets, developers can grow their dataset to any size they want, including terabytes. They do not have to compromise on commands or datatypes. The services frees users from having to deal with nodes and clusters.
  • True high availability – this means that the dataset is entirely served from memory. If all the data is coming from a single server, they can lose their entire data set, but RedisDB added high availability provisions so that the if data center is out, it will switch to replica in another data center. And this is done seamlessly so that users don’t feel it.
  • Stable top performance – while open source Redis is fast, Bengal said, it is also sensitive to many parameters, such as the size of data set, and having to share a physical server with another app, which can degrade performance. RedisDB neutralized all that so that users can enjoy stable performance.
  • Zero management – when a user connects to the server it automatically takes care of scaling, clustering and failure recovery.

Redis is served in a memory database, Bengal said, which means the entire data set is stored in RAM, as opposed to disk-based databases.

"RAM is much faster than disk, and Redis is the fastest database on earth, processing hundreds of thousands of transactions per second."

The company, which has 10,000 customers, also announced Tuesday that it has reached its 1,000th paying customer. Services using RedisDB include Room 77, Glide, Electronic Arts, Scopely and Rumble.

"We want to make RedisDB an essential and must have piece of the stack," Bengal said. "We want any app to use RedisDB and we have a good chance of getting there."

Update:

The company has decided to reverse the name change and will continue to be known as Garantia Data.

"We were about to change our company name to RedisDB and even acquired the domain redisdb.com for that purpose; however, respecting a request by Slavatore Sanfillipo, the Redis creator, we decided to stick to Garantia Data," Bengal wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. 

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