
Redis Labs Raises a $60M Series E Round - moritzplassnig
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/redis-labs-raises-a-60m-series-e-round/
======
symisc_devel
> Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told me the company’s isn’t cash positive yet. He
> also noted that the company didn’t need to raise this round but that he
> decided to do so in order to accelerate growth. “In this competitive
> environment, you have to spend a lot and push hard on product development,”
> he said.

I'm always amazed how startups like this where R&D practically cost nothing
are not profitable yet after years in the market and thousands of customers.
C'mon guys 99% of the work is already done by antirez and the open source
community.

~~~
zachsnow
99% of the job building the core tech; the other 99% of the job is sales,
support, account management, marketing, etc.

It’s never just the product, no matter how much we builder types might like.

(No idea whether 60M is the right number for the rest though.)

~~~
sk5t
Sometimes writing the code is, like, 10% or 20% of the work. Everything else--
marketing, hiring, lead gen, legal, accounting, billing, contract negotiation,
compliance, on and on--while not creative work, absolutely and disappointingly
cannot be ignored.

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hannob
Again this bullshit:

“When we came out with this new license, there were many different views,” he
acknowledged. “Some people condemned that. But after the initial noise calmed
down — and especially after some other companies came out with a similar
concept — the community now understands that the original concept of open
source has to be fixed because it isn’t suitable anymore to the modern era
where cloud companies use their monopoly power to adopt any successful open
source project without contributing anything to it.”

Okay, so here's the thing, at FOSDEM this year there were multiple events
around this issue, and I haven't seen a single person defend the stance of
Redis and others. Also the original concept of open source is doing fine,
thanks. The problem is a couple of overvalued, VC-backed companies that found
out they don't have a business model that is compatible with the promises they
made to their investor.

~~~
avip
This is weird. I just came back from a gun rights rally in AZ, and haven't
seen a single person defend the stance for gun control.

~~~
Aeolun
I’m not sure there’s people in the world that benefit from Redis’s stance
other than Redis.

~~~
hobofan
If that means that RedisLabs stays in business and Redis stays maintained
(which is not otherwise guaranteed), it means that the general public still
benefits from it.

~~~
merb
you know that you can have redis maintained, by just by hiring antirez? So
instead of raising $60M you can just pay $500k per year.

~~~
hobofan
Who says that antirez can be hired "that cheaply"? Assuming he also owns
equity of RedisLabs, anything short of a good exit might not be worth the
oportunity cost for him.

Of course that is baseless speculation, but so is assuming that Redis could be
continued to be maintained "by just hiring antirez".

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miguelmota
From the license page:
[https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/](https://redislabs.com/community/licenses/)

> Is Commons Clause open source?

> According to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), open source licensing cannot
> limit the scope of a license – it only applies conditions to exercising it.
> With this model, no one can stop you from doing whatever you want with the
> software, whether commercial or non-commercial, or (famously) good or evil.
> Therefore, the no-sale restriction imposed by Commons Clause means that any
> software under this new license is non-open source by definition. However,
> in practice, Commons Clause only adds a limitation concerning fair use, and
> we believe that both licensing approaches share the same core value of
> making software available for use by anyone.

That's a long way of saying the new license is not OSI-compliant. The new
license is BSD with a common clause which according to the president of OSI,
this clause instantly renders it non-approved.

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-
comm...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-licensing-war-commons-
clause/)

------
coleifer
I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are
currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while
they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code.
There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this
would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread
support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.

~~~
antirez
Thanks coleifer, I understand that the current development path may look odd,
but it's definitely not the first time: the critiques for Lua scripting or
Pub/Sub where much stronger AFAIK :-) However I want to really share what is
the process behind and why certain features like ACLs are so important (for
reasons very different than the ones you may guess I think, that is, no
enterprise customers in need for security), and why RESP3 has out-of-band data
channels support (even if they are not implemented by the server). I'll write
a blog post today, and reply here with the address. Cheers!

P.S. I'll also address threading and persistence.

~~~
coleifer
Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully to my comment. If I
had been talking directly to you, I hope I would have written something less
entitled and expressed more gratitude for the gifts you've given the
community, and which you continue to improve.

Redis is _exactly_ the kind of software that gives me joy. Aesthetically and
intellectually. Its pieces are orthogonal -- a word you used in your blog
post. The code is small, tight, and well designed. It invites you to think
more creatively. The lolwut command was also a very good innovation!

~~~
antirez
Your comment was already great. It was the comment of somebody that cares
about Redis and is closely observing what direction it is headed. Also I went
through your own set of questions exactly and decided to do certain things
after some consideration: it's not obvious at all if this was the right
decision but at least the process can be made transparent. Thanks!

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rsweeney21
Speaking to a room full of CEOs at a summit, the CEO of Chegg once said "If
you are raising a series F, it means what you think it means."

~~~
btian
What does it mean?

Tesla raised Series F in 2009, and it's still alive.

~~~
adventured
Workday also raised a series F.

They're presently worth $42 billion with $2.1b in sales, 172% sales growth
over three years, and are likely set to be another enterprise software
juggernaut.

It clearly doesn't inherently mean anything. What matters is whether the
business is growing properly versus the capital being consumed. If more
capital will reasonably accelerate growth further, feed the business more
capital (depending on what the owners want to pursue of course).

~~~
Aeolun
And I’ve recently used it for the first time, and it’s only marginally less
horrible than the Oracle stuff. How does all enterprise HR software end up so
horrible?

~~~
delfinom
Sales people bending over to every single of their enterprise's customers
demands to make a sale (and get their commission). And engineering wanting to
kill themselves and just duct taping on all the nonsense sales forces on them.

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mychael
As a customer, this is unfortunate news.

Why is it so hard to just supply an honest service in exchange for money and
take a nice profit?

~~~
mavdi
You’re getting downvoted but I too hate the world domination plans of every
single successful start up.

~~~
redisman
Reminds me of being promoted until you fail. Growing and creeping until you
fail to deliver the core service you were the best at. HN skews hard to the
unicorn-or-bust mentality for some reason.

~~~
halfjoking
Probably because YC owns HN and they only make money if more people drink the
VC Kool-Aid?

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ris
Hmmm. The more money companies raise, the less honesty we tend to see from
them.

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ralusek
What is the longterm path for things like Redis Labs, Mongo, and Elastic, etc?
They all seem to have an open source database which they in turn monetize by
offering as a DBaaS. But can they really bet against AWS in the long run?

Elastic's own cloud ElasticSearch is better than AWS's notoriously bad
implementation, but what if it wasn't? Elastic's cloud offering runs on AWS
and other third party offerings, so all it would take would be AWS reaching
relative parity in quality, and they would then surely have the upper-hand by
being the cloud infrastructure their own offering is run off of. I feel like
the same is true with AWS Elasticache vs Redis Labs. What if AWS reaches
parity, but can additionally offer the ease of not managing 2 accounts, as
well as the ease of co-locating the cache with the app server and putting it
all in a VPC. What is the endgame for these DBaaS when they have AWS copying
their work?

~~~
davman
The longterm path is to relicense with
[https://commonsclause.com/](https://commonsclause.com/) and prevent AWS from
selling the software as a platform.

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mushufasa
How many letters can you do? F, G, H?

~~~
antirez
The idea is to follow plain ASCII given that Redis handles strings as binary
blobs. So after round Z we are going to do round [, followed by \ and ].

~~~
wolfpwner
So Series A is already the 65th round, right?

~~~
mattigames
27th, blank-or-control characters don't make good labels, plus their phonetic
version may confuse investors, e.g. "Series Escape" (033) just sounds bad

------
redm
I wonder if this raise is to continue scaling the existing product
customers/add runway or to expand its's scope to something new.

~~~
antirez
Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even
more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and
other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/...

I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the
Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the
modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture
any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher
protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread
to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.

~~~
jacquesm
I hoped you'd be beyond the need to be sponsored by now!

~~~
antirez
You optimist...

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etaioinshrdlu
Redis Cloud is the very definition of a great cloud service. Cheap, easy,
reliable, scalable up and down with no downtime. Can be placed in your same
AWS region.

------
ww520
I really hope they succeed. Redis has real solid tech that has helped tens of
thousands (millions?) websites scaled.

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sandGorgon
This looks like direct competition to Kafka. The technology behind Kafka
Streams is solid and can probably give Kafka a run for their money (in fact
Redis has more adoption than Kafka). However their product is not in the same
quality range.

Hopefully this should fix it.

~~~
tbrock
Surely you jest. Redis is less stable than kafka? I must have missed
something.

~~~
sandGorgon
I didn't say it was less stable - I said that the product has less features.
And I mean product in the larger sense of things - management tools,etc etc.
Similar to the Confluent Platform - for the streaming usecase.

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misiti3780
what do they offer that the amazon version does not ?

~~~
foodandsport
I use the Redis service. It's way less expensive. around a 90% less expensive
for me. It has all of the high end features. Fault tolerance, etc.

AWS does not compete on price or performance and the Redis servers are hosted
directly in whatever cloud facility you'd like.

On final note. Since setting it up, I've never had to look at it again.

~~~
Rafuino
Do you use Redis on flash by chance? I'm guessing it could help reduce
reliance on more expensive memory-heavy servers (and their higher cost), but I
don't hear often about real experiences with the enterprise version of Redis.

~~~
foodandsport
I use the RedisLabs SaaS. No idea how it works and I don't want to know.

Regarding the speed difference between Flash and RAM etc, it's a very
interesting topic.

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Max_Horstmann
Would it still be fair to say that Redis typically is used for things like
caching, messaging etc (and it's amazing for that), but not as a primary data
store? Or did I miss something?

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the_common_man
Does anyone know how much redis enterprise costs?

~~~
jillesvangurp
Price transparency is not optional for SAAS products. Seems to be a well kept
secret on their website. Instant turn off for me. It means there are hidden
costs, special deals at the discretion of some sales person, and other sales
BS you have to deal with. I see this as an anti pattern for a SAAS service. We
pay for lots of SAAS stuff at the company I run; we don't talk to sales people
for any of that stuff ever. We engage with their support when stuff is broken.
But not sales.

Redis is a great product but I fail to see the valuation that comes with a 60M
investment (a billion+?). Yes, the cloud offered variety could potentially be
interesting but competing products are available and this seems to be a
commodity product running on commodity hardware. AWS already offers it so do
others, I believe.

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oarabbus_
A wise man once said "you don't want to raise a series D and certainly nothing
after that"

