REDIS LABS

Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) was not created by Redis Labs. It was created by Salvatore Sanfilippo, an Italian developer also known as antirez, in 2009.

He was building a real-time web analytics startup and found that his database could not handle the write throughput he needed. He started writing a key-value store in C that kept everything in memory instead of on disk.

It was absurdly fast. He open-sourced it and the developer world immediately noticed.

Redis became the default answer to one of the most common web infrastructure questions: where do I put this data that needs to be accessed in milliseconds? Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman founded Redis Labs in 2011 to build an enterprise cloud service on top of the open-source Redis engine.

They had no ownership of the core Redis software — antirez maintained that independently — but they built a business around managed Redis deployments, enterprise support, and proprietary data structures and modules that extended the base software. In 2020 antirez transferred maintenance of the open source project to Redis Labs.

That move handed the company enormous influence over the project — and set up the license controversy that came three years later.

Redis Labs (now Redis Ltd.) sells Redis Enterprise and Redis Cloud — managed, high-availability deployments of the Redis database with features like clustering, active-active geo-distribution, and persistent storage that are not available in the free open-source version. Enterprise customers pay subscription fees based on memory, throughput, and support tier.

The cloud product is self-serve and consumption-based. The company also makes money on professional services and training for large enterprise deployments.

Redis is used by virtually every major technology company in the world for caching, session management, message brokering, and real-time leaderboards.

Redis: the in-memory data structure store. The fastest way to cache data, manage user sessions, build leaderboards, or run a message queue.

Used by Twitter, GitHub, StackOverflow, Pinterest, and thousands of others. Redis Enterprise: the commercial version with high availability, clustering, and persistence features.

Redis Cloud: managed Redis on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Redis Stack: bundles Redis with proprietary modules including RediSearch, RedisGraph, RedisTimeSeries, and RedisJSON.

Redis Insight: a desktop GUI for visualizing and debugging Redis databases.

Redis Labs grew by being the professional services layer on top of a technology that developers already loved. Redis the open-source database grew virally — developers installed it because it was fast and simple.

Redis Labs converted that organic adoption into enterprise contracts by offering the managed, scalable, supported version that operations teams actually wanted to run in production. The company built proprietary modules — RediSearch (full-text search), RedisTimeSeries, RedisJSON, RedisAI — that added capabilities beyond the base Redis and gave enterprise customers reasons to pay for the commercial product rather than self-host.

Redis Cloud gave the company a consumption-based revenue stream that scaled with the growth of the cloud infrastructure market.

The license change in March 2024 was the defining crisis of the company's history. Redis Ltd.

announced it was changing the Redis open source project's license from the permissive BSD license to a dual license of the Server Side Public License (SSPL) and the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2), which prevents cloud providers from selling Redis as a managed service without a commercial agreement. The announcement sparked immediate backlash.

Within days, the Linux Foundation announced a fork of the last BSD-licensed Redis codebase under the name Valkey. Amazon, Google, Oracle, and Ericsson all backed Valkey.

The message from the cloud giants was clear: if you change the rules of an open-source project you didn't create, the community will fork you out of existence. Redis Labs found itself in the same trap Elastic and MongoDB had faced with Amazon — except the open source community, not just Amazon, pushed back.

Sequoia Capital (Series A-B), Bain Capital Ventures, Francisco Partners, Goldman Sachs, Viola Group, Tiger Global Management.