Raising a unicorn worth $2 billion - another letter from our CEO

In my last blog post I announced our Series C funding round and wrote about the future I saw for Aiven. Although it was only seven months ago, a lot has happened since then.

We have roughly doubled our revenue run rate. We’ve grown our team from 140 to over 230 employees, and expanded the team to Singapore and New Zealand. And we’ve also launched our Open Source Program Office making upstream contributions to several open source projects as a company.

All this culminates in our latest news: Aiven has raised $60 million of additional funding, which extends our Series C round to $160 million in total. We also got a new valuation for the company: Aiven is now officially worth $2 billion, making us the newest unicorn to hail from the Nordics.

It’s humbling to think about the journey that’s taken us from zero to here in just six years. And I couldn’t be more grateful to Aiven employees and my fellow founders, as well as our customers and partners who have made this possible. Kudos!

“It’s humbling to think about the journey that’s taken us from zero to here in just six years.”

Our mission has always been clear: we want to make developers’ lives better, and help them tap into the benefits of open source data technologies without the burden of maintenance and management.

As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to help more and more developers do this. Now we’re at a point where we’re seeing Aiven become the leader in providing managed cloud data infrastructure around the world.

“We want to make developers’ lives better, and help them tap into the benefits of open source technologies without the burden of maintenance and management.”

In my conversations with customers, I’m also hearing more and more how Aiven has helped them reach other goals, such as lowering their operating costs, achieving greater business agility and improving developers’ day-to-day productivity.

To quantify all this, we recently sponsored a study by IDC to interview some of our customers and look into the business value of Aiven services. The results make for interesting reading. Overall, I believe we’ve just scratched the surface of open source technologies’ benefits for companies. And I’m happy to have investors who share the vision backing our growth: World Innovation Lab, IVP, Atomico, Earlybird, First Fellows, Lifeline Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

“I believe we’ve just scratched the surface of open source technologies’ benefits for companies.”

So, continuing to champion easy and accessible open source is what you can expect from Aiven going forward. But what does this look like in practice?

Here are some of the things that we’re working on right now:

• We’re launching our Aiven startup program, Cluster, in a couple of weeks at Slush, the coolest startup event in the world
• We’re already serving customers in 50+ countries around the world, and next we’ll open offices in Paris and Singapore to work more closely with customers in those regions
• We’re widening our product portfolio with new open source technologies, like Apache Flink which enables more sophisticated streaming use cases directly on the Aiven platform
• We are growing our Open Source Program Office to devote even more time and resources towards contributing back to different open source communities

I ended my last blog post saying that I was excited to see where the open road ahead would take us. Today we’re already a lot farther ahead, but there’s still a long way to go. And that’s how we like it.

Wrapping up

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Further reading

• Aiven joins forces with Slush to define the future of entrepreneurship