
Redis Labs Raises $100M - davidgl
https://redislabs.com/press/redis-labs-raises-100-million-series-f-financing/
======
jnwatson
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.

~~~
ttul
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.

~~~
dvirsky
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.

~~~
sjg007
How does redis make money?

~~~
dvirsky
Hosted cloud redis and enterprise redis. It's all in their website.

~~~
treeman79
I used it a few times.

Pricy, and worth every penny.

Made my life so much easier

~~~
dvirsky
Do you mean the hosted or enterprise versions? The enterprise version is a
behemoth (in a good way). Tuning an open source redis to be able to do what it
does is nearly impossible.

~~~
treeman79
Redid labs.

Click a few buttons it gives me an URL to point my apps at.

Now and then I’d get an email, hey instance X needs more memory, click here to
see what’s going on, or just drag the slider to a higher plan.

Worked great, Hardest part was giving good names so I could remember what each
instance was for.

------
redm
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/](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/)

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

~~~
devmunchies
> 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.

~~~
henryfjordan
From a licensing perspective, yes. However I looked into installing custom
modules in Elasticache Redis once and you cannot do it (Same with RedisLabs'
hosted solution although you can at least install their modules).

If you installed Redis on an EC2 instance manually you could run the modules.

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
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
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.

------
bra-ket
I hope antirez has equity in it

~~~
echelon
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.

~~~
TuringNYC
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.

~~~
timyim
Yes there are. MariaDB has built a license that prevents strip-mining of open
source code and prevents Cloud providers from offering it as-a-service.

CockRoachDB followed suit and implemented the same.

~~~
josephcsible
Those aren't open source.

~~~
mikepurvis
Right, and that may have consequences for whether a particular distro packages
you or whether the OSI shines on you, but those are just part of the trade-
off; a license like this is still a perfectly valid choice for a given
endeavour.

------
simonebrunozzi
>... 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...](https://redislabs.com/press/redis-creator-salvatore-sanfilippo-
antirez-joins-redis-labs)

~~~
cnst
I 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

------
dec0dedab0de
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?

~~~
smt88
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
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.

~~~
skrebbel
Maybe 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.

------
bionhoward
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)

------
ximeng
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-...](https://ciotechie.com/news/redis-labs-gets-
usd60-million-in-series-e-funding-round-for-database-platform/)

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

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

~~~
echelon
I'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
Yes, that is correct.

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

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

~~~
darkhorse13
Probably 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.

------
reilly3000
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).

------
jugg1es
That is a lot of money to raise for an established technology. Sounds like
they might be standing up their own cloud?

~~~
nostrademons
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
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.

------
jbirer
Happy to see money going where it's deserved.

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

~~~
lovegoblin
This comment is HN distilled.

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

