Redpanda builds a modern streaming service that captures data in real time while maintaining backwards compatibility with Kafka. Its platform emphasizes unlimited data retention, which the company says changes how developers and organizations build real-time applications and supports use cases like large language model training. Customers named in the article include Cisco, Akamai, Lacework and Vodafone. The company reported it quintupled revenue last year and doubled headcount from about 60 employees in February 2022 to roughly 160 today. Management is using the company’s growth to expand go-to-market, scale for larger customers, and beef up customer support while actively hiring and focusing on leadership diversity. CEO Alex Gallego says migration from Kafka to Redpanda carries minimal cost, and the product has been winning deals consistently against competitors. Founded in 2019 (originally called Vectorized), Redpanda develops an open-source streaming tool that remains backward compatible with Apache Kafka while simplifying the streaming stack. The product unifies multiple streaming components into a single tool and leverages low-cost cloud-native storage and WebAssembly to enable limitless data retention. That limitless-retention capability is a focal point for developers and a key driver of adoption. The company reports growth from thousands of clusters deployed early in the year to hundreds of thousands by year-end, and it says it is deploying more clusters per day than in its first six months. Customers include Akamai, Cisco and Sprout. Headcount has grown from 22 employees in January 2021 to around 60 today, and Redpanda plans to continue hiring; it also runs a scholarship program called Hack the Planet.

Total raised

$150M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Jun 2023