REDIS LABS

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

He was building a real-time web analytics startup and found that his database could not keep up with the writes he needed. So he wrote a key-value store in C that kept everything in memory instead of on disk.

It was absurdly fast. He open-sourced it and developers noticed immediately.

Redis became the default answer to a very common question: where do I put data that needs to be read in milliseconds? Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman founded the company in 2011 as Garantia Data, renamed it Redis Labs, and built an enterprise cloud business on top of the open source engine.

They did not own the core Redis software at first. In 2020 antirez stepped back from maintaining it and the company's team took over.

That handed the company enormous influence over the project, and set up the license fight that came four years later. The company dropped "Labs" and became simply Redis in 2021, and Rowan Trollope replaced Bengal as CEO in 2023.

Redis Labs (now just Redis) sells Redis Software (formerly 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 a huge share of major technology companies for caching, session management, message brokering, and real-time leaderboards.

Redis Open Source: the in-memory database, used for caching, user sessions, leaderboards, queues and now vector search for AI apps. Since Redis 8 (2025) it folds in the search, JSON and time series features that used to ship separately as Redis Stack.

Redis Software (formerly Redis Enterprise): the self-managed commercial version with clustering and active-active geo-replication. Redis Cloud: managed Redis on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Redis Insight: a desktop GUI for exploring and debugging Redis databases. In 2025 it bought Decodable, a real-time data pipeline company, to feed data to AI agents.

Redis Labs grew by selling the enterprise and cloud version of a technology developers already loved. Open source Redis spread virally because it was fast and simple.

The company converted that adoption into paid contracts by offering the managed, scalable, supported version operations teams wanted in production. It built extra modules, search, JSON, time series, that gave customers reasons to pay rather than self-host, and Redis Cloud gave it revenue that grows with cloud usage.

Lately it has repositioned around AI, pitching Redis as fast memory and vector search for AI agents, helped by the Decodable acquisition in 2025.

The license change in March 2024 was the defining crisis of the company's history. Redis moved the project from the permissive BSD license to a dual license (SSPL and the Redis Source Available License), which stops cloud providers from selling Redis as a managed service without a deal.

The backlash was immediate. Within weeks the Linux Foundation launched Valkey, a fork of the last BSD-licensed code, backed by Amazon, Google, Oracle and others, and many cloud users moved over.

Redis partly backed down. Antirez rejoined the company in November 2024, and in May 2025 Redis 8 added the AGPLv3 open source license as an option.

The company now has to win developers back while competing with a free fork run by its biggest cloud rivals.

Bain Capital Ventures and Carmel Ventures (now Viola) led the early rounds. Goldman Sachs led the Series D in 2017, Francisco Partners the Series E in 2019, and Bain Capital Ventures and TCV the $100 million Series F in 2020.

Tiger Global led the $110 million Series G in 2021, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 joining, at a valuation above $2 billion. Dell Technologies Capital is also an investor.