UPDATED 08:00 EDT / MARCH 23 2021

CLOUD

Managed open-source software startup Aiven raises $100M in Series C funding

Aiven Ltd., a company that provides fully managed services for open-source technologies on the most popular public cloud platforms, announced a $100 million funding round today that brings its total amount raised to $150 million.

Atomico led the Series C round together with participation from Salesforce Ventures and World Innovation Lab, plus existing investors Earlybird Venture and IVP. The round brings the company’s value to $800 million.

Finland-based Aiven lends its expertise to enterprises by providing fully managed services for some of the most popular open-source software, including the Apache Cassandra and PostgreSQL databases, the Apache Kafka event streaming platform, and Elasticsearch, which is used by companies to search through their own data.

The key thing about Aiven is that it allows companies to use those technologies on the public cloud of their choice, with options including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Aiven then takes care of all the configuration and setting up and ensures resilience, compliance and security. In other words, it aims to make life a whole lot easier for those companies.

Aiven said in a press release that open-source software is becoming increasingly popular, and that the use of open-source databases outstripped that of commercial services for the first time in January of this year.

Oskari Saarenmaa, co-founder and chief executive officer of Aiven, said the company’s mission is to champion open-source software and make the lives of developers much easier. By providing its fully managed services, he said, it enables developers to focus on building their applications without worrying about how to implement the technology that powers them.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that open-source software can be unwieldy and hard to manage.

“Aiven’s value proposition is a compelling one for many enterprises as they’ll get a vendor-supported open-source data platform plus multicloud support too,” Mueller said.

The company is also a big contributor to the open-source platforms it helps to manage, and it said it will use part of the proceeds from its Series C round to increase its contributions to those technologies. In addition, it will launch a formal open source program office. Not least, it wants to double its employee headcount over the next year and expand into North America and the Asia Pacific region.

“The most recent funding will enable us to continue adding new service capabilities, grow our team and expand into new markets, as well as more significantly contribute to the open-source community,” Saarenmaa said.

Image: Aiven


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