NoSQL database aerospike announced today that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Current investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round.
In 2009, the company started as a key-value store with a focus on the adtech industry; Since then, Aerospike has diversified its offering quite a bit. Today, its core offering is a NoSQL database optimized for real-time use cases at scale.
In 2022, Aerospike added support for documents and then followed up with graphics and vector capabilities, two database features that are crucial for building real-time AI and machine learning applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform that can work with data at a really high scale or, as we call it, unlimited scale,” said Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer. “We have been fortunate that many of our customers have started their journey to scale with us or started the journey earlier and grown on the platform. Therefore, our premise that real-time data and real-time access to data will be important in virtually every industry. Our founding principles were to truly deliver real-time performance with data at any scale and the lowest [total cost of ownership] in the market.”
In part, Aerospike, which offers its service as a hosted and on-premises platform, can deliver on this promise through its hybrid memory architecture that allows you to increase RAM usage to speed up data access with fast flash storage, or any combination of the two. Aerospike competitor Redis recently purchased Speedb offer similar capabilities, also with a view to helping its customers reduce costs.
Image credits: aerospike
Today, the company’s clients include companies such as Airtel, Transunion, Snap, and TechCrunch parent company Yahoo.
However, right now it is definitely the rise of AI that is generating a lot of interest in Aerospike and the company wants to be in a position to capitalize on it through this new funding round.
Unsurprisingly, that means the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its innovations around AI, which primarily focus on its graphics and vector capabilities. Iyer told me that Aerospike specifically seeks to combine those two capabilities.
“Going forward, there are some synergistic ways that graphical and working errors can come together,” he said. “A simple use case I use for this, for example, is if you’re searching for a specific document and you have embeddings and you store them in a vector database, you want to use a vector search to get to that specific document. But if you’re looking for a set of similar documents, a vector search can get you in the neighborhood and then a graph can give you a similar corpus of documents because of relationships and so on.”
This, of course, was also what got investors interested in the company. Aerospike raised its last round in 2019 and according to the company’s CEO, it didn’t need to raise now, but there is a huge opportunity for Aerospike to capitalize on now, something Sumeru co-founder and CEO George Kadifa also emphasized.
“AI is transforming the economy and presents new opportunities for growth and innovation,” he said. “aerospike“With its impressive customer base and performance-at-scale advantage, it is uniquely positioned to become a building block for the next generation of real-time AI applications.”