Aiven: $40 Million Funding And Eric Liaw Joins Board

By Amit Chowdhry ● Feb 6, 2020
  • Aiven, a startup that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced it raised $40 million in Series B. And IVP General Partner Eric Liaw is joining the board.

Aiven — a startup that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure — announced it raised $40 million in Series B funding. Including this funding round, Aiven raised a total of $50 million.

This funding round was led by IVP. And existing investors Earlybird VC and Lifeline Ventures along with the family offices of Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa and Datadog founder Olivier Pomel also participated in the round.

There are organizations of all sizes that are moving to the cloud and utilizing open-source software as the backbone of their data infrastructure. And while larger companies have the resources and expertise to manage these deployments internally, most companies require some level of third-party support to effectively utilize open-source.

What Aiven does is democratize access to the latest open source technologies by offering fully-managed services for popular open-source projects like Apache Kafka and Cassandra, Elasticsearch, M3, and PostgreSQL in the public cloud.

Aiven now serves more than 500 businesses worldwide, including Atlassian, Comcast, OVO Energy, and Toyota. And it is available on all major public clouds.

“This investment is evidence of a growing appetite from enterprises for open source data technologies,” said Aiven co-founder and CEO Oskari Saarenmaa. “Aiven is able to close that gap by offering a platform that abstracts away all the complexities of operating those technologies so our customers can focus on their business applications and driving the bottom-line. With the new funding, we’ll be able to expand our product roadmap and work more closely with our customers globally to help them utilize open source technologies at scale.”

Aiven saw tremendous growth in 2019. And the company tripled its revenue run rate, added 200 new customers, doubled headcount, and opened two new offices in Berlin and Sydney.

This round of funding will enable Aiven to expand its presence in the U.S. and accelerate Aiven’s goal of empowering developers and democratizing access to the latest open source technologies.

And the funding will also be used for tripling headcount and adding new open source technologies like M3 and Flink along with introducing new enterprise-grade features. Plus the funding will also allow Aiven to provide new cloud services for customers and continue empowering developers to focus on core products rather than the underlying infrastructure.

IVP General Partner Eric Liaw is joining Aiven’s board of directors in conjunction with the funding round.

“The increasing adoption of open-source infrastructure software and public cloud usage are among the incredibly powerful trends in enterprise technology and Aiven is making it possible for customers of all sizes to benefit from the advantages of open source infrastructure,” Liaw explained. “In addition to their market potential and explosive yet capital-efficient growth, we were most impressed to hear from customer after customer that ‘Aiven just works.’ The overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers is a testament to their hiring practices and the strong engineering team they have built. We’re thrilled to partner with Aiven’s team and help them build their vision of a single open-source data cloud that serves the needs of customers of all sizes.”