Database provider Redis Labs raises $44M Series D led by new investor Goldman Sachs to challenge Oracle, has now raised $86M in total
Patience Haggin / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2017 round is the early marker in a funding arc the related coverage traces forward: Redis Labs followed the Goldman-led Series D with a $60M Series E led by Francisco Partners in 2019 and a $110M Series G at a $2B+ valuation by 2021, validating the commercialize-the-open-source-database playbook the Series D was raised to fund.
For Goldman Sachs, the deal fits a repeatable pattern visible across the corpus: it also backed data-security startup jSonar ($50M Series A) and later led SingleStore's $116M Series F extension at a $1B+ valuation, making the bank a recurring financier of the enterprise data stack that incumbents like Oracle dominate.
First-order effects
- Redis Labs gains $44M and a marquee Wall Street lead investor, giving it the balance sheet to sell commercial services around the open-source Redis data store directly against Oracle's installed base.
- Goldman Sachs takes an early position in an open-source infrastructure vendor at a stage where its later data-stack bets — jSonar, Very Good Security, SingleStore — show it was systematically building exposure.
Second-order effects
- Oracle, whose cloud revenue growth was already the metric investors were watching, now faces a funded challenger attacking the database layer from the open-source side rather than through licensed competition.
- Other open-source database vendors gain a financing template: Goldman's willingness to lead a Series D here presaged its lead on SingleStore's unicorn round five years later.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the relational-database market structurally splits between incumbent license vendors like Oracle and venture-funded open-source commercializers, with capital markets — not just engineering — deciding which model wins enterprise workloads.
- Banks like Goldman evolve from passive LPs into direct strategic owners of data-infrastructure layers (storage, security, protection), a position that compounds as enterprise data becomes the asset class they already trade.
The trend: Enterprise databases are shifting from license-locked incumbents toward venture-funded open-source commercializers, with financial institutions like Goldman Sachs increasingly leading the capital behind that shift.