Vectorized: free and source available, cloud native infrastructure for real-time applications

Over the past decade, we have seen an incredible shift to the “real-time economy.”

Need to go somewhere? Pick up your smartphone, get real-time pricing and availability and 5 mins later a car arrives to pick you up.

Bored? Fire up Netflix and based on your preferences, there are dozens of highly relevant recommendations immediately waiting for you.

Sluggish? Get on your Peloton to work out, beat your personal record and compete in real-time with riders around the world.

What’s amazing is that behind each of these seemingly simple actions, there’s a complex cloud of servers, networks, and storage powering, analyzing, and executing each of your interactions. And, in today’s world, we demand real-time performance. What’s worse than staring at that spinning ball?

While our world has changed dramatically over the past decade, a core piece of infrastructure has not. Underpinning a large portion of today’s real time applications is Kafka, an elegant piece of infrastructure software that was originally designed over a decade ago at LinkedIn. Kafka was written at a time when the cloud was still nascent, when storage was still based off spinning disks, and when multi-core processors were expensive and scarce. Consequently, although Kafka works well-enough, it is extremely complex, hard to manage and doesn’t take full advantage of today’s modern hardware.

Great entrepreneurs see an opportunity and have the courage to challenge the status quo. Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Vectorized, is one such entrepreneur.

Eighteen months ago, when I first met Alex in a San Francisco coffee shop, he laid out an ambitious plan to modernize the real-time backbone for applications with a brand new architecture. Although I was initially skeptical, it quickly became clear that Alex was one of the few people in the world who could actually pull this off. Alex has dedicated his career to building real-time, data streaming infrastructure, and is a rare technical talent who can both build and explain what’s he building. He also embodies the immigrant mindset. He grew up in Colombia, immigrated to the U.S. in his teens and taught himself to program before going on to study Cryptography at NYU. He brings an incredible focus to his work and has a strong sense of purpose that emphasizes his drive and ambition.

We were excited to lead Vectorized’s initial seed financing with our friends at Haystack in 2019 to help bring his vision to reality.

Now, 18 months later, what Alex and the Vectorized team has accomplished is incredible. Their product, Redpanda, is a modern, free and source available streaming platform for mission critical workloads.

Written in C++, Redpanda squeezes the most out of today’s multi-core hardware, resulting in at least 10x better performance than existing solutions.

Architected for simplicity, Redpanda has removed the complexity of managing third party orchestration systems such as Zookeeper.

Built for the cloud, Redpanda takes native advantage of the compute and storage primitives resident in AWS, GCP and Azure, delivering out-of-the-box functionality such as disaster recovery and global high availability.

Designed for true real-time processing, Redpanda enables developers to ship code and execute that code as the data enters and traverses the pipeline. At its lowest level, Redpanda uses WebAssembly, an intermediary language that allows software engineers to write and edit code in their favorite language to perform data transformations at the streaming source.

And, perhaps the most exciting piece is that Redpanda is completely Kafka API compatible, which means that the millions of real time applications already leveraging Kafka can easily switch to Redpanda, without any code changes… and get an immediate boost in performance and simplicity.

Today also marks an exciting milestone, as we at Lightspeed are thrilled to announce that we have led Vectorized’s Series A financing, with participation from our friends at Google Ventures and Haystack. With over $15M in capital raised, Alex and the Vectorized team are now hardening the soon to be released Redpanda Cloud Offering and also extending enterprise-class features and functionality to power some of the world’s biggest streaming infrastructures. Me, my partner Nnamdi and the entire Lightspeed team are all excited to partner with Alex and the Vectorized team as they modernize real-time infrastructure for a cloud-first world.

-Arif and Nnamdi

Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. He focuses on investments in enterprise infrastructure, security and SaaS and sits on the boards of a number of rapidly scaling companies, including Vectorized, TripActions, Netskope, Moveworks, Appzen, and CyCognito. In his free time, Arif plays ice hockey with his wife, who yells at him for never passing the puck to her.

Nnamdi Iregbulem is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he focuses on software investments across developer tools, application infrastructure, and machine learning. He works closely with Lightspeed portfolio companies Vectorized, Materialize, and several other unannounced investments. A self-taught programmer, Nnamdi loves to code in his free time and especially loves Python.

Lightspeed is a multi-stage VC firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Lightspeed has backed 400+ companies globally in the past two decades including Nutanix, Affirm, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Snap and Nest.