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February 24, 2022

Redpanda Nabs $50M Series B for Data Streaming

San Fran-headquartered Redpanda Data is a relative newcomer to the scene, having only been founded (at the time, as “Vectorized”) in 2019. The rename came courtesy of its core product, itself called Redpanda: a data streaming platform that the company says provides developers with a unified “engine of record” for real-time and historical enterprise data. Now, Redpanda has announced a new win: $50M in Series B funding to advance its global goals.

The Redpanda platform, which is compatible with Apache Kafka, advertises a handful of features that it says “free developers from the limitations of previous approaches”: a single binary to deploy with a built-in schema registry and no external dependencies; predictability at petabyte scale in cloud-native environments; a reduced hardware footprint; and more. Redpanda was released in early 2021.

“The world has shifted to real-time first, raising the criticality of data streaming in the modern stack,” said Alex Gallego, CEO and founder of Redpanda Data. “We are empowering every developer to realize today the customer experiences of the future through data-intensive applications and services leveraging the full spectrum of data. While our current products already offer huge advantages in terms of simplicity, reliability, and performance, our sights are set on much bigger goals. We aim to fundamentally reshape and extend how organizations make use of streaming data. It is energizing to have a board that supports our vision and has the financial muscle to power our explosive growth.”

The Series B funding round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Haystack VC. The $50M in Series B funding brings Redpanda’s total funding to $76M.

“Redpanda has built streaming data infrastructure for developers from the ground up to deliver simplicity, performance, and reliability while enabling enterprises to continue to run the software stacks they’ve already invested in,” said Dave Munichiello of GV. “We’re thrilled to partner with Alex Gallego and the entire team as they build the preeminent platform for developing modern applications that rely on real-time streaming data.”

A year in, Redpanda boasts clients like Cisco, Sprout, and Akamai Technologies. “Redpanda is what I wished I had ten years ago,” said Sandy Wilbourn, vice president of the Carrier Division at Akamai Technologies. “Simple, fast, reliable and compatible with all my existing Kafka code.”

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