Well from the POV of the open source Redis, also before this round, but even more now, Redis Labs is going to continue to sponsor me, Fabio Nicotra, and other folks around the OSS part doing community/patches/...
I think that part of the round will also serve to put more efforts in the Redis extensions provided as modules. Incidentally I need to extend the modules system a lot more, especially with "hooks" so that modules can capture any command execution, because yesterday I wanted to implement the Gopher protocol as a module and I could not do that easily without spawning a thread to listen to some other socket, and remained hardly disappointed.
There's almost certainly a non-trivial sales team spend here. Redis Enterprise isn't a decision that organizations take lightly, and databases aren't cheap. Mongo is public on a similar model, so there's almost certainly enough room to grow with their current offerings (licenses and hosting).
Based on 238 employees, they're probably at $25m+ in revenue. Many companies start to think about a "second act" at this point, but few of them actually pull it off. So we'll probably continue to see improvement around the core product and a slew of new integrations, but I'd be surprised if they came up with a totally standalone new product that's worth $X0,000,000 / year in short order. There's too much to do with Redis itself and the hosting platform to devote so much effort to a brand new effort.
I wonder what VCs expect of Redis Labs now that they've raised a total of $146M. Let's say the VCs are shooting for a 10x return... does that mean everyone's expecting a sale/IPO for $1.5B (with revenues of maybe $25M/year)? It took RL 7+ years to get to this point, so what do investors see that I don't see?
10x return on the $60m investment means getting $600m back. Depending on ownership stake, that's probably between $2.5b and $6b after IPO. A big multiple these days is like 20x, so that's $120m - $300m in revenue.
It may take some time to get there, but they'll almost certainly break $100m. The VCs at this round probably won't sell immediately after the IPO, either -- trying to make 10x in 2 years isn't the plan.
I think their sales team is going to be in for a long, hard slog. Yes, Redis is popular right now, but the middleware space gets harder every year. Cloud providers slurp up the easy, low-hanging fruit ("click this checkbox to add a managed Redis instance to your deployment"), so all that'll be left are the big, slow, complex enterprise sales. Yeah, they pay well, but it's a brutal, competitive sales cycle, and that kind of customer often wants a lot of high-touch post-sales engineering services.
From the article: "the company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and continue to invest in the Redis community and product development."
