Momento Reinvents Caching for Cloud Databases With $15 Million in Seed Funding Led by Bain Capital Ventures

Momento emerged from stealth with its Serverless Cache. A cache accelerates response times by delivering commonly used data faster. By making caching serverless, Momento delivers the first instantly elastic, highly available cache that can serve millions of transactions per second. Momento is already being used by well-known brands around the world like CBS, NTT Docomo and Wyze Labs.

“Momento is actively supporting us in production. I was blown away by how quickly we were able to get up and running with it. It will save us hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, while meaningfully improving our operational stance,” said Tianqiang Liu, CTO of Wyze Labs, a smart home technology company with more than 6 million users that control more than 15 million devices. 

Momento’s CEO Khawaja Shams led Amazon DynamoDB, and together with his co-founder, Daniela Miao, they scaled it to become one of the world’s largest fully managed database services. DynamoDB powers Amazon.com and Amazon Video, serving more than 100 million transactions per second, including some of the most visible livestreams like the Super Bowl and the world’s first Live 4K Stream from Space. 

Shams and Miao teamed up to apply their expertise to a challenging space: serverless caching. Momento’s Serverless Cache lets developers add a cache to their modern cloud stacks with 5 lines of code, similar to how DynamoDB enables customers to access an extremely large database with a single API call.

“Our favorite memories from working together on the DynamoDB team are from watching developers quickly build massive systems with a single API call instead of worrying about the distracting infrastructure details. The serverless revolution is radically boosting developer productivity, which has an inspirational impact on the pace of innovation in society. Momento aims to fill the missing pieces in the serverless era – and empowers customers by replacing a complex caching stack with a simple abstraction,” said Khawaja Shams, co-founder and CEO of Momento. 

The leading cloud caching technologies are more than a decade old and integrating them into a modern cloud stack is akin to fitting a square peg through a round hole. These legacy solutions are inefficient, difficult to set up, hard to maintain and inelastic for today’s dynamic applications. This results in massive infrastructure overspending, lost developer productivity and avoidable outages due to misconfigurations. 

“Organizations end up making the same mistakes repeatedly – and they learn these lessons one outage at a time. Our goal at Momento is to make it ridiculously easy to add a cache and get it right the first time,” said Daniela Miao, co-founder and CTO at Momento.

Momento Serverless Cache is built to optimize and accelerate any database that runs in AWS or GCP today and is a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) serverless platform so there is zero infrastructure to manage. A Momento cache is ready in under a second via a single API call. Momento Serverless Cache automatically manages hot-keys, maintains high cache hit rates, keeps tail latencies low and provides instantly scalable capacity.

Momento Raises $15 Million in Seed Funding

Momento has received $15 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures and with participation from The General Partnership and angels Marianna Tessel (CTO at Intuit), Neha Narkhede (co-founder and former CTO at Confluent), Tom Killalea (first CISO at Amazon), Don MacAskill (CEO of Flickr/Smugmug) and John Lilly (former CEO of Mozilla). Momento plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team, to build a full cycle GTM team, to expand the Momento platform and to add support for additional clouds. 

“‘Fast’ and ‘easy’ are often said, but very hard to achieve, especially in a complex area like caching,” observed Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “Momento’s team has unique insight into this area from their work at AWS and have created a seamless experience. Developers can now build caching into their apps within five minutes on a simple, pay-per-use pricing model. It’s fast and easy in every sense.”