Aerospike Inc., which sells a highly scalable, real-time NoSQL database management system, said today it closed a $109 million investment round led by Sumeru Equity Partners LP with participation from Alsop Louie Partners LLC. That brings its total funding to $241 million.

Aerospike’s flash-optimized in-memory model scales from gigabytes to petabytes with high consistency and low latency. Its core markets are advertising technology, financial services, telecommunications, retail and healthcare. The model is available in an open-source community edition and as a commercial product with enterprise features.

“Our value is that we can linearly scale with our customer and still deliver submillisecond performance,” said Chief Executive Subbu Iyer. “We need 80% less infrastructure because of our hybrid memory architecture that leverages [solid-state drives].”

Aerospike was originally based on a key-value store architecture, but the company has expanded it in recent years to support JavaScript Object Notation, graph and vector capabilities. Last year it released its first managed service and plans to integrate vector and Langchain support into its cloud offering to meet the mounting demand for artificial intelligence development. “Vector and graph are complementary, and going forward, we believe there are opportunities to bring them together,” Iyer said.

AI is nothing new

Though AI is an opportunity, the CEO said it’s nothing new to his company. “AI uses a lot more data, so platforms that scale and analyze a lot of data will do well,” Iyer said. “We are very positive about AI, but for us, it’s not really new because many of our customers have deployed AI pipelines for the last several years.”

Nevertheless, International Data Corp. forecasts more than 31% compound annual growth in AI software sales over the next three years, so the company believes it’s well-positioned to benefit. “We offer the only production-level vector solution that delivers consistent accuracy at scale on significantly less infrastructure than anyone else,” Iyer said in a press release.

Reference customers include Adobe Systems Inc., AppsFlyer Inc., Barclays PLC, Flipkart Internet Private Ltd. and PayPal Holdings Inc.

Iyer said Aerospike plans to use the new funding to hire talent, step up its support for AI and cloud services, accelerate its sales and marketing efforts, and build a sales channel. It recently hired Chief Scientist Naren Narendran, who worked on machine learning projects at Google LLC, and Chief Engineering Officer Srinivasan Seshadri, who specializes in machine learning applications in search and internet advertising.

“We haven’t marketed ourselves much until the last year or so,” Iyer said. “We are changing that, focusing more on marketing and working with developers.” Last year the company formed a developer advocacy team and set up a developer hub.

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