Open-source software champion Aiven Ltd. said today it has closed on a bumper $210 million Series D round of funding, bringing its total amount raised to $420 million, at a valuation of more than $3 billion.

Today’s late-stage round was led by Eurazeo, and joined by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock plus existing investors IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, World Innovation Lab and Salesforce Ventures.

Aiven is an interesting startup that provides fully managed services for some of the most popular open-source software projects that run on public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Aiven’s services cover the Apache Cassandra, InfluxDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, plus the Apache Kafka event streaming platform, Elasticsearch and more.

What’s especially useful is that Aiven operates those projects for its customers on the cloud of their choice. Aiven then takes care of the configuration and sets things up, then ensures the necessary resilience, compliance and security. For customers, it makes their life a whole lot easier and allows them to focus their energies on their business.

Aiven’s services are clearly in demand, for today’s round represents the third time in the past 14 months that the company has closed on a big round of funding. The startup raised $100 million in a Series C round back in March 2021, before following up with a $60 million extension of that round in October.

“Aiven continues to deliver on its core value proposition, making open-source based offerings more viable for enterprises,’ said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. “Executives like Aiven because it takes the hassle and risk of running open source away, developers like it because they can focus on code and investors like it because it delivers growth and valuation.”

The company, which also provides fully managed services for Grafana, an observability platform, Redis, an in-memory data structure store, and M3, an open-source time series database and metrics engine, said it will use the funds raised today to double its employee headcount. It will also launch a global sustainability program intended to “enable collective action” within its community and encourage customers to build more sustainable applications. Furthermore, Aiven said it plans to launch beyond its newest hubs in Japan, Singapore and New Zealand to elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region and also Latin America.

Aiven co-founder and Chief Executive Oskari Saarenmaa said his company’s mission is to make life easier for developers, so they can focus on building better applications. “Further investing in supporting open, community driven development of software and sustainable use of cloud services is a natural extension of what we value and have always wanted to achieve,” he said.

Eurazeo Managing Director Zoé Fabian described Aiven as a “European-born champion” that’s on the way to becoming a global leader in the fully managed services business.

“Its differentiated platform approach truly caters to the developer community by democratizing access to open-source technologies hosted on any cloud,” she said. “The company has seen rapid adoption by customers across all sizes and industries with a demonstrated track record of product-led growth.”

Images: Aiven