NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised $100 million in a Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in the round.
In 2009, the company started as a key-value store focused on the adtech industry. Aerospike has since diversified its offerings considerably. Today, its core product is a NoSQL database optimized for large-scale real-time use cases.
In 2022, Aerospike added support for documents and later added graph and vector capabilities. These two database capabilities are essential for building real-time AI and ML applications.
Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer said, “We were primarily founded as a real-time data platform that can operate on data at very large scale, meaning unlimited scale.” “We are fortunate that many of our customers are starting large-scale journeys with us or starting their journeys sooner and growing into our platform. So real-time data and real-time access to data is almost The premise is true that it's going to be important in every industry. Our founding principle was really to provide real-time performance on any scale of data, and to provide the lowest performance. [total cost of ownership] It's on the market. ”
In part, Aerospike, which is offered as a hosted platform and on-premises, is able to deliver on this promise through a hybrid memory architecture that allows faster flash storage to increase RAM usage and speed data access. Any combination of the two. Aerospike's competitor Redis recently acquired Speedb to provide similar functionality. This is also aimed at helping customers reduce costs.
Image credit: Aerospike
Currently, the company's customers include Airtel, Transunion, Snap, and TechCrunch's parent company Yahoo.
But it's definitely the AI boom that's driving a lot of interest in Aerospike right now, and the company hopes to be in a position to capitalize on that with this new round of funding.
Naturally, this means the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate innovation around AI, primarily focused on graph and vector functions. Iyer said he is considering combining the two features, especially with Aerospikes.
“There are several possibilities for a synergistic combination of graphs and work errors in the future,” he said. “For example, a simple use case I use for this is if I'm looking for a specific document, and I've embedded and stored them in a vector database, I can use vector search to access that specific document. But if you're looking for a set of similar documents, vector search allows you to find neighborhoods, and then graphs allow you to get a corpus of similar documents by relationship, etc.
Of course, that's also why investors were interested in the company. Aerospike last raised funding in 2019 and didn't need to raise now, according to the company's CEO, but Aerospike has a big opportunity to capitalize now, Sumeru co-founder and managing director George Kadifa also emphasized.
“AI is transforming the economy and creating new opportunities for growth and innovation,” he said. “With its impressive customer base and massive performance advantages, Aerospike is uniquely positioned to become a foundational element for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”