We’re pleased to announce that Lightspeed is leading Redpanda Data’s Series C financing. The $100 million round enables the almost five year old company to accelerate its incredible growth, and continue investing in providing developers the world-class streaming data capabilities they need — so they can build the modern, mission-critical applications their employers, customers, and end-users demand.
Our partnership with Redpanda (founded as Vectorized), first began in 2019, when I met founder and CEO Alex Gallego in a San Francisco coffee shop. What was supposed to be a 45 minute meeting stretched into a 2+ hour deep discussion about the future of streaming data infrastructure. Alex shared his vision of building an efficient, developer-friendly alternative to the cumbersome, expensive Kafka infrastructure that would be easy to swap in and immediately boost performance, simplify the stack, and unlock significant cost savings. What was clear was that Alex knew his stuff, was a world class expert in building data infrastructure, and was very focused on building a special company.
Coffee was followed by a sushi lunch a couple of days later, and we dove deeper into the technical details of how he planned to deliver on his core insight: Kafka, the incumbent open-source streaming event platform, was built for a different time — a world of spinning disk drives, big iron data centers, and single-core CPUs. A world of Java. Fast forward to today: It’s a cloud-first world. Computation and data storage have been decoupled, and software optimized for modern environments and services can deliver massive improvements in speed, reliability, and cost efficiency. Redpanda was built from the ground up for this world, written in C++ with cloud primitives, massive scalability, and performance in mind.
Core to Alex’s vision was to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Redpanda has been Kafka-API compatible from the beginning. By changing a single line of code, developers can easily switch to Redpanda and enjoy immediate benefits: higher performance, less infrastructure, a simpler back-end to manage, and much lower costs to run and maintain.
The final piece of the puzzle is the most obvious but essential: flexibility. Customers who want to can bring their own cloud (or on prem system) to run Redpanda, while others can choose to run their instance on Redpanda’s own dedicated, secure, isolated cloud, for maximum ease and flexibility. No matter how big or small a team or application, there’s a solution that fits.
That was the vision, and many sushi lunches later, Alex and his team have more than delivered on their promise, having become industry and developer darlings in the process (Github stars on their community edition more than doubled last year alone, to over 7,000). Indeed, the customer list the company has accumulated in such a short amount of time speaks to the power and utility developers find when they turn to Redpanda.
The way customers are using Redpanda today shows it is core to the applications of tomorrow. Not only does Lacework, for example, use Redpanda to power real-time cybersecurity monitoring, Vodafone processes billions of microservices transactions without missing a beat. One of the largest sports leagues in the US — and soon the largest international sporting event in the world—will both power their scoring and stats services using Redpanda. And Fortis Games powers their virtual scores and stats with Redpanda, among several other major game studios.
We live in a streaming world, and a cloud-first world. What developers need is tooling that is built for both. It’s become undeniable that Redpanda sits at that intersection. Whether written from the ground up or modernized for the next generation of technology, Redpanda is essential to the applications of tomorrow, being built today. And the sky’s the limit.
Lightspeed has been there with Alex and his team through every round, leading its seed financing, its Series A, participating in the Series B, which GV led, and now leading its Series C growth round, with participation from Haystack and GV as well. The $165 million raised to date speaks for itself, and will fuel the company to its next level of growth and success.
We look forward to continuing to support the company through the next phase of its growth, and to seeing how big this red panda can grow.
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