After only nine months, we are doubling down on Aiven
In May of 2019, we announced that Earlybird Venture Capital was backing Aiven by leading its $10m Series A. Not even 9 months later, we are excited to continue with Aiven on their path to deploy completely open-source, integrable cloud data architecture by doubling down in their $40m Series B led by Silicon Valley-based IVP. We are happy to welcome Eric Liaw and Michael Miao on board.
A company’s data pipeline (how it collects, transports, transforms, stores and analyzes its data) is the foundation of its success; but, building a performant, reliable, and scalable pipeline comes with significant infrastructure challenges.
Aiven solves these challenges by providing customers a platform from which they can launch a fully-managed, open-source, cloud-native data infrastructure in a few short minutes — one that simply snaps into existing workflows.
We outlined why we were excited about the market opportunity due to the amount of data generated, collected and managed growing exponentially in our previous blog post in May 2019. Not much has changed about that since then. Neither have our strong convictions of the four co-founders Oskari, Heikki, Hannu and Mika changed since our initial investment.
Seeing the Aiven team grow to 40+ people with the opening of the Sydney and Berlin offices in 2019 has been thrilling to witness. And with the firm looking to increase its US presence by expanding its Boston office and opening one in San Francisco, there sure is space for the 100 new hires which are planned for 2020 to grow into. The whole Aiven team continues to impress customers and investors alike — with their relentlessness and continuous striving for excellence, all whilst holding their Nordic pragmatism dear.
“Aiven just works” customer after customer testifies. Taking care of the complexities that come with operating open source data technologies lets Aiven’s customers fully focus on their core business. Developing and expanding this quality product offering with impressive capital efficiency in the past months is a key driver for our enthusiasm. Our belief in Aiven (although not just from our side, but rather the market itself) has been supported by their great growth — with 200 new customers in 2019 and more than tripling its ARR to $13m at an ARR net dollar retention of 160%. With already more than 500 businesses — from Atlassian over Comcast to OVO Energy — using Aiven, the company is continuously focussed on improving the enterprise-readiness of its platform.
Aiven’s strong growth, our fundamental belief in the market opportunity, and the strong team is why we at Earlybird are doubling down on Aiven. The Series B will allow Aiven to provide new cloud services for customers and continue positive innovation for the open source community. Let’s see what the next 9 months have in stock. Buckle up!
To get started on your own fully-managed, multi-cloud hosted database and messaging service, sign-up here.
To read Aiven’s 2019 review, please see here.
To join the Aiven team, please see their current job offerings here.
