
(Anton Watman/Shutterstock)
Streaming information platform Redpanda has raised $100 million in a Sequence C funding spherical for a complete of $165 million in funding.
Redpanda is a Kafka-compatible streaming information platform that the corporate says is excessive efficiency, operationally pleasant, and cloud prepared. The San Francisco-based firm was based in 2019 as a Kafka alternative for mission vital programs.
Apache Kafka has been a dominant streaming platform since its launch in 2011, however as a Redpanda blog post posits, Kafka was designed throughout a time when information volumes had been comparatively low and when {hardware} was dearer and fewer highly effective than as we speak.
“The software program answer that dominated this period? Apache Kafka—a distributed publish-subscribe system open-sourced by LinkedIn that was designed to reap the benefits of low-cost commodity spinning disks by means of virtualization,” wrote the put up’s writer, Doug Flora. “Its reputation exploded, and the Kafka API ecosystem unfold to each layer of the information stack. Most information software program and companies as we speak come pre-wired to speak to Kafka. And, with 80% of the Fortune 100 utilizing it, Kafka continues to carry the crown because the go-to streaming information platform for a lot of.”

(Supply: Redpanda)
Right this moment’s information processing necessities can attain trillions of occasions per day, a quantity Redpanda says Kafka can’t sustain with, so organizations with ultra-intensive information necessities are searching for sooner, extra scalable options.
Redpanda positions its platform as a contemporary, sooner, simpler, and cheaper various to Kafka that’s designed to fulfill as we speak’s demanding information streaming workloads. The corporate says it’s a self-contained, single binary with its schema registry, HTTP proxy, and message dealer built-in. The platform is absolutely Kafka API-compatible and may work with all Kafka streaming apps and instruments with no code modifications needed. Redpanda is engineered in C++ with a thread-per-core structure that the corporate claims permits it to maximise useful resource utilization, keep constantly low latencies, and ship excessive throughputs. The aforementioned blog post claims testing reveals that Redpanda outperforms Kafka at tail latencies (p99.99) by a minimum of an element of 10.
Alex Gallego, the founder and CEO of Redpanda, mentioned in a press release that the corporate was constructed for engineers.
“The hero of the Redpanda story has all the time been the engineer, palms on keyboard, behind a terminal, materializing her concepts right into a working system. That’s who we constructed Redpanda for, and why we made it simple to make use of, scalable to double-digit gigabytes per second, and suitable with all the present functions,” he mentioned.
This newest spherical was led by returning traders Lightspeed Enterprise Companions with participation from GV and Haystack VC. The corporate mentioned in a launch it will leverage this newest capital to allow data-intensive functions with new foundational capabilities which might be past the scope of legacy streaming information platforms. Redpanda says it has doubled its workforce and has seen a 5x progress in income throughout this fiscal yr.

Outcomes from Redpanda’s inner benchmarking examine present its efficiency in opposition to Kafka, based on the corporate. (Supply: Redpanda)
“Final yr we grew to 1000’s of manufacturing installations. The funds will assist us speed up this progress whereas constructing a future the place all information is immediately obtainable, with embedded processing in a multi-tenant platform that really scales to zero, lastly making streaming accessible to the 44 million builders on this planet,” mentioned Gallego.
Redpanda has linked with clients in data-intensive industries like finance, expertise, cybersecurity, manufacturing, and aerospace. Its Redpanda streaming information platform is source-available to builders beneath the BSL license.
In December 2022, Redpanda started providing a bring-your-own-cloud deployment mannequin that it says combines the effectivity of a totally managed service with the information sovereignty and safety of self-hosting. This deployment possibility is most well-liked by over 30% of Redpanda’s clients, the corporate mentioned.
“Redpanda has demonstrated great momentum beneath Alex’s management,” mentioned Arif Janmohamed, accomplice at lead investor Lightspeed Enterprise Companions. “Redpanda’s information platform was constructed from the bottom up for the cloud period and has delivered unbelievable efficiency and efficiencies for our modern buyer base. We’re excited that this funding will assist to increase Redpanda’s go-to-market actions, bringing its advantages to an excellent higher viewers.”
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