Momento Inc., a real-time data platform that aims to help developers serve massive-scale audiences reliably, today announced it has raised $15 million in an early-stage round led by Bain Capital Ventures to build out its infrastructure capabilities.

Returning investor The General Partnership also joined the Series A round alongside additional angel investors, including former Intuit Inc. Chief Technology Officer Marianna Tessel, Confluent Inc. co-founder Neha Narkhede, Flickr Inc. CEO Don MacAskill and former Mozilla Corp. CEO John Lilly.

Founded in 2021, Momento’s solution delivers robust cloud primitives such as cache, storage and publish-subscribe event messaging architecture for developers that can reliably scale when they need to. In a time when the massive scale of cloud data is becoming more important, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence features, these capabilities are becoming even more important, Momento CEO Khawaja Shams told SiliconANGLE in an interview.

“When you see the spinner on your phone once in a while — if you’re watching a video or trying to use an application — our job is to make that spinner go away,” said Shams. “Our job is also to make it really easy for developers to build delightful experiences for their customers, and we do this by eliminating some of the distractions that get in the way of a developer.”

When a developer goes to build a cloud application, there are a lot of moving parts. For example, if a software engineer wanted to build a chat application for 4 million customers, they’d still have to build a Redis node or a Redis cluster, think about web sockets, manage those sockets, membership, presence, authentication, instrument it and more. What Momento does is turn all that into a single primitive that can scale out with fine-grained control.

Using Momento, Shams explained, companies can scale rapidly when demand spikes without worry. There’s no need to be concerned about a single or cluster of nodes getting overwhelmed by a sudden surge. This applies to all of the company’s services including serverless cache, newly released low-latency event messaging service Topics or the company’s new storage service released in alpha mode.

Examples of how customers have used Momento’s service include Wyze Labs Inc., a security camera hardware and service provider that had originally used Amazon Web Service’s S3 for its AI cameras. However, with tens of millions of cameras around the country taking pictures of pets, packages, people and other movements every day, S3 became a terrible place to store temporary images. S3 is great if you want to hold an image for a long time, but bad if it’s small only want to keep it for a short time. That’s where Momento Cache came in.

“Cost-wise, it was bad,” said Shams, “So they uploaded billions of images to us from S3. They saved a ton of money doing it. Was a very rapid transition, The performance is better because it’s being served out of a cache. The data only lives 14 days, so it’s fast, it’s cheaper and it was easy to move.”

Momento also powers the backend for Raider.IO, a ranking website for the video game World of Warcraft that has thousands of leaderboards that can reach up to 40 million entries. Its services are also used by CBS Broadcasting Inc., NTT Dotcomo Inc., Paramount Pictures Corp. and Taco Bell Corp.

With this fundraise, Shams said, it’s a very interesting time for the company because over the past few years, Momento has been working with design partners at scale to build a system that will help customers resolve pain points for mission-critical availability.

“Now is the time for us to go from building a cache to building an entire platform,” Shams said. “Today, we see a play on the development side of building an entire platform that enables real-time applications, for that we launched Topics. We’re adding storage capabilities for long-term retention of data as well, to make that developer experience even easier. To kind of collapse the web server, the cache, the notifications and the longer-term storage inside of one primitive so that’s the development, product development side, and helping grow our product line into a full-on platform.”

Shams added that Momento also intends to double down on customer adoption and marketing.

Image: Shutterstock/Production Perig