Aiven , a Finnish open source-as-a-service provider, announced the completion of a $210 million Series D financing, with a pre - money valuation of $3 billion. The round was led by Eurazeo, with participation from funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, as well as existing investors IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, World Innovation Lab and Salesforce Ventures.
Founded in 2016, Aiven provides fully managed services for some popular open source technologies on a public cloud infrastructure platform. Its expertise spans Apache Cassandra, InfluxDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, and Elasticsearch; it also provides managed services for Grafana, Redis, and Uber M3.
The company raised its first $100 million Series C in March 2021; it was valued at just $800 million at the time. In October of the same year, they announced their latest raise of $60 million in outside funding, bringing the total to $160 million in Series C funding. At the same time, its valuation reached 2 billion US dollars, becoming the latest unicorn company in the Nordic region.
The announcement states that the company has grown its workforce by more than 65% since October 2021; and aims to use the new capital to continue its international expansion beyond its newest hubs in Japan, Singapore and New Zealand into Asia Pacific and Latin America Rest of Americas Americas Region. Aiven hopes to double its current workforce by 2022 to help develop new platform capabilities and launch a global sustainability initiative, with the goal of taking collective action within the Aiven community to build more sustainable applications in the cloud.
Following the establishment of a formal open source program office and the launch of the Cluster project last year, the company is committed to further popularizing the best data technologies, reducing the environmental impact of cloud services, and increasing diversity and inclusion in Aiven and the wider tech industry .
Aiven CEO Oskari Saarenmaa believes that investor confidence is based on the fact that there are tens of millions of software developers worldwide. "When they want to build something new, they're keen to do it on open source software; and the easiest way for them is in the cloud, on software that is offered as a service."
And pointed out that its growth is mainly due to the Apache Kafka stream processing platform and relational database PostgreSQL, the public demand for PostgreSQL and Kafka has driven interest in cloud services . Developers are using Kafka to adapt batch systems to real-time processing, while also building new applications with real-time at their core. At the same time, PostgreSQL is becoming the de facto standard open source database.
"PostgreSQL has been developed over the years and is now quite comprehensive and you can build anything on top of it. The other thing that's good for it is that it's really community driven. There's no single thing behind it company with a very broad project team.”
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