Highlights:

  • Redpanda reported a successful fiscal year during which its revenues multiplied by five and its workforce doubled, although specific figures were not disclosed.
  • After receiving the new funding, Redpanda intends to allocate it mainly toward sales and marketing.

Recently, Redpanda Data Inc., which develops a data platform that consolidates real-time and historical data, announced that it has raised USD 100 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to USD 163 million.

The funding is notable amidst the stagnant state of technology markets in the past year, especially since all funding came from existing backers such as GV Management Co. LLC, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Haystack Management Co. LLC.

Redpanda reported a successful fiscal year during which its revenues multiplied by five and its workforce doubled, although specific figures were not disclosed. The remarkable success of Redpanda Data Inc. can be attributed to the cost-effectiveness of its product, according to Chief Executive Alexander Gallego. As a convenient substitute for Apache Kafka and related commercial services based on an open-source project, Redpanda provides significant savings to its clients, resulting in the thriving condition of the business.

He stated, “In this economy, Redpanda is a great fit because we make the CIO look great, and engineers love us. We’re delivering 600% to 800% savings, and customers are talking about taking 400 workloads down to 40. There are massive economic advantages.”

Won Every Sale

Gallego confidently stated that Redpanda achieved victories in all sales transactions for the last six months when competing with commercial competitors like Confluent Inc. He commented, “As long as we get to have an honest conversation with the developer. When people are forced to look for alternatives, we just win.”

Within 16 months since its last funding round, Redpanda acquired prominent enterprise clients such as Akamai Technologies Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Activision Blizzard Inc., and Moody’s Corp. Recently, it unveiled a new offering named “bring your own cloud.” This fully managed service operates on a customer’s private cloud and guarantees data security within their local environment.

According to Gallego, “bring your own cloud” revolutionizes the existing cloud pipeline services model since it does not require customers to transfer/upload their data to the cloud provider. He stated, “We basically separate the control and data plane so that Redpanda lives inside the customer’s network, but they still experience a fully managed cloud.”

Gallego said BYOC has become the preferred choice for companies operating in regulated industries or sensitive to customer data privacy concerns. He mentioned that BYOC contributed nearly 30% of the company’s revenue growth in the first half of this year.

After receiving the new funding, Redpanda intends to allocate it mainly toward sales and marketing. Additionally, the company aims to expand the support range for application program interfaces beyond Kafka to incorporate the open data lake format of Apache Iceberg.

As per the CEO, Redpanda has sufficient operating capacity to last them for several years, and attaining additional funds wasn’t necessary for the company’s current operations. Gallego added, “It’s about expanding go to market.”

According to him, Redpanda’s ultimate objective is to eliminate batch processing. He added, “I’ve been doing this for 14 years, and I’ve never heard executives say they want to access a report at midnight. Once you operationalize streaming data, you never go back.”