Redis Labs Inc., which sells a commercial version of the popular Redis open-source database management system, today said it has closed $100 million in a new late-stage funding.

The Series F round brings Redis’ total financing to more than $246 million and values the company at more than $1 billion, making it a so-called unicorn.

In a statement, the company said the COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying rush by businesses to the cloud has hastened growth. “The unprecedented conditions brought on by COVID-19 have accelerated business investments in building applications that require real-time, intelligent data processing in the cloud,” said Chief Executive Ofer Bengal.

Redis is a key-value in-memory DBMS prized for its flexibility and high performance. It can be used both as a database and as a cache and message broker. Redis features built-in replication, scripting in the Lua language, least-recently-used cache eviction and customizable levels of on-disk persistence.

Although the core data model is key-value store, Redis also supports other kinds of values, including strings, lists, sets, sorted sets, hashes, streams and bitmaps. The database ranking site DB-Engines lists Redis as the top-ranked key-value store and eighth most popular DBMS overall. Among its more prominent customers is Twitter Inc.

Redis Labs claims more than 7,500 customers, including many high-profile retailers and big tech firms such as Microsoft Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc. The company said revenue has been growing about 50% per year and is now close to $100 million.

Earlier this year the company signed an alliance deal with Microsoft to make Redis Enterprise the top tier of Azure Cache for Redis and launched RedisAI for high-performance inferencing artificial intelligence use. The company boasts that it has been named “Most Loved Database” for four straight years in the annual developer survey run by community site Stack Overflow.

The investment was co-led by Bain Capital Ventures LP and TCMI Inc.’s TCV investment arm with participation by existing investors Francisco Partners Management, LLC, Goldman Sachs Inc.’s Growth Fund, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital.

Photo: Redis Labs on Facebook