NoSQL database Aerospike today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also participated in this round.
In 2009, the company started as a key value store focused on the advertising technology sector; Aerospike has since considerably diversified its offering. Today, its core offering is a NoSQL database optimized for large-scale, real-time use cases.
In 2022, Aerospike added document support, then added graphics and vector capabilities, two crucial database capabilities for building real-time AI and ML applications.
“We were founded primarily as a real-time data platform capable of working with data at very large scale, or as we call it, unlimited scale,” said Subbu Iyer, CEO of Aerospike. “We’ve been fortunate that many of our customers have either started their journey at scale with us, or started the journey earlier and moved onto the platform. So our premise has stuck to the idea that real-time data and real-time access to data will be important in almost every industry. Our founding principles were truly to 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, is able to deliver on this promise thanks to its hybrid memory architecture that allows it to increase RAM usage to speed up access data with fast flash storage – or any combination of the two. Aerospike competitor Redis recently acquired Speedb to offer similar capabilities, also with the aim of helping its customers reduce costs.
Image credits: Aerospike
Today, the company’s clients include Airtel, Transunion, Snap and Yahoo parent company TechCrunch.
Right now, though, it’s certainly the AI boom that’s driving a lot of interest in Aerospike and the company wants to be able to capitalize on that with this new funding round.
Unsurprisingly, this 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 was specifically looking to combine these two capabilities.
“In the future, there are synergistic ways to combine chart and work errors,” 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’re storing them in a vector database, you want to use a vector search to access this specific document. But if you’re looking for a similar set of documents, a vector search can take you to the neighborhood, and then a graph can give you a similar corpus of documents because of relationships and other things.
This is of course also what sparked investor interest in the company. Aerospike raised its last funding round in 2019 and according to the company’s CEO, there was no need to do it now, but there is a big opportunity for Aerospike to capitalize now, which the co-founder and director General of Sumeru, George Kadifa, also pointed out.
“AI is transforming the economy and presenting new opportunities for growth and innovation,” he said. “Aerospikewith its impressive customer base and performance benefits at scale, is uniquely positioned to become a fundamental part of the next generation of real-time AI applications.
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