Redpanda lands $100 million to expand its data transmission channels – News Block

Redpanda Data Inc., the developer of a data platform that unifies real-time and historical data, said today that it has raised $100 million in an oversubscribed Series C round that brings its total funding to $163 million.

The size of the funds is remarkable given the moribund state of the tech markets over the past year. Also of note, all funding came from existing backers, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV Management Co. LLC, and Haystack Management Co. LLC.

Redpanda said it is coming off a banner fiscal year in which revenues more than quintupled and its workforce more than doubled, though he did not disclose absolute numbers. Chief Executive Alexander Gallego said his company’s business is booming because the product, which is a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka and commercial services based on that open source project, saves customers a lot of money.

“In this economy, Redpanda is a perfect fit because we make the CIO look great and the engineers love us,” he said. “We offer savings of 600% to 800% and customers talk about reducing 400 workloads to 40. There are huge economic benefits.”

won every sale

Gallego stated that his company has won every sale agreement against commercial competitors such as Confluent Inc. during the last six months “as long as we have an honest conversation with the developer. When people are forced to look for alternatives, we just win,” he said.

In the 16 months since its previous funding round, Redpanda has signed with top-tier enterprise clients including Cisco Systems Inc., Akamai Technologies Inc., Activision Blizzard Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., and Moody’s Corp. Late last year introduced what it calls “bring your own cloud,” a fully managed cloud service that runs in a customer’s private cloud with data stored on-premises.

Gallego said BYOC is a fundamentally different model than other cloud pipeline services because it doesn’t require customers to upload their data to the cloud provider. “Basically, we separate the data and control plane so that Redpanda lives inside the customer’s network, but they still experience a fully managed cloud,” he said.

The model has been popular with companies in industries that are regulated or sensitive to the privacy of customer data, he said, noting that BYOC accounted for about 30% of the company’s revenue growth during the first half of this year. anus.

Redpanda plans to invest much of the new funding into sales and marketing, as well as extending application program interface support beyond Kafka to include the Apache Iceberg open data lake format.

The company has “many years of experience” and did not need the funds to continue operations, the CEO said. “It’s about expanding market access,” Gallego said.

Ultimately, he said, the company is looking to outdated batch processing. “I’ve been doing this for 14 years and I’ve never heard executives say they want access to a report at midnight,” she said. “Once you get data transmission up and running, you never come back.”

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