Aiven raises $40m Series B to accelerate open source cloud platform

Aiven, a startup that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, today announced that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding. This brings the total funds raised to $50 million. The round was led by Silicon Valley-based IVP, whose notable investments include Datadog, Dropbox, GitHub, HashiCorp and Slack. Existing investors Earlybird VC and Lifeline Ventures, as well as family offices of Risto Siilasmaa, chairman of Nokia, and Olivier Pomel, founder of Datadog, also participated in the round. 

Organizations of all sizes are moving to the cloud and leveraging open source software as the backbone of their data infrastructure. While larger companies have the resources and expertise to manage these deployments internally, most companies require some level of third-party support to effectively utilize open source. 

Aiven democratizes access to the latest open source technologies by offering fully-managed services for popular open source projects like Apache Kafka and Cassandra, Elasticsearch, M3 and PostgreSQL in the public cloud. Aiven now serves over 500 businesses worldwide, including Atlassian, Comcast, OVO Energy and Toyota, and is available on all major public clouds.

“This investment is evidence of a growing appetite from enterprises for open source data technologies,” said Oskari Saarenmaa, CEO and co-founder at Aiven. “Aiven is able to close that gap by offering a platform that abstracts away all the complexities of operating those technologies so our customers can focus on their business applications and driving the bottom-line. With the new funding, we’ll be able to expand our product roadmap and work more closely with our customers globally to help them utilize open source technologies at scale.”

Aiven experienced tremendous growth in 2019. The company tripled its revenue run rate, added 200 new customers, doubled headcount and opened two new offices in Berlin and Sydney. The new round of financing will enable Aiven to expand its presence in the U.S. and accelerate Aiven’s mission of empowering developers and democratizing access to the latest open source technologies. 

Aiven will use the proceeds of the round to triple headcount, add new open source technologies like M3 and Flink, and introduce new enterprise grade features. IVP General Partner Eric Liaw will join Aiven’s board of directors.

“The increasing adoption of open-source infrastructure software and public cloud usage are among the incredibly powerful trends in enterprise technology and Aiven is making it possible for customers of all sizes to benefit from the advantages of open source infrastructure,” Liaw said. “In addition to their market potential and explosive yet capital-efficient growth, we were most impressed to hear from customer after customer that ‘Aiven just works.’ The overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers is a testament to their hiring practices and the strong engineering team they have built. We’re thrilled to partner with Aiven’s team and help them build their vision of a single open-source data cloud that serves the needs of customers of all sizes.”

For the first time in five years, enterprise software companies raised more venture funding than consumer technology companies – more than $30 billion. Capitalizing on this trend, Aiven has emerged as a leader in providing organizations with the best open source database and data processing technologies in the cloud. The Series B will allow Aiven to provide new cloud services for customers and continue empowering developers to focus on their core products, not the underlying infrastructure.

To learn more about Aiven’s capabilities, visit https://aiven.io/.