Redis Labs, which offers commercial services around the Redis in-memory data store, raises $60M Series E led by private equity firm Francisco Partners
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Redis Labs' Series E extends a steady climb: it raised a $44M Series D led by Goldman Sachs in 2017 with an explicit pitch of challenging Oracle, and this round brings in a different kind of backer — private equity firm Francisco Partners, whose recent activity spans large software take-privates and a fund raise well above target.
The trajectory held after this round: by 2021 the company had closed a $110M Series G led by Tiger Global at a $2B+ valuation, making the 2019 round the midpoint of a capital ramp built on selling commercial services around an open-source in-memory database.
First-order effects
- Redis Labs gains $60M and a PE-grade lead investor to scale its commercial services business around the Redis data store, moving past the $86M total it had accumulated through the Series D.
- Francisco Partners adds a growth-stage open-source database company to a portfolio otherwise weighted toward control deals in enterprise software.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in the adjacent data-infrastructure market face the same funding arms race — SingleStore's $80M Series E months later shows enterprise-data startups matching these round sizes to keep pace.
- Cloud providers and managed-database competitors now confront a better-capitalized Redis Labs pushing paid services on top of software they could otherwise commoditize.
Third-order effects
- Heavy outside capital intensifies the open-core monetization tension: Redis later moved to a dual-license model, drew community criticism, and ultimately reverted its main system to AGPLv3 — a pattern suggesting funded open-source vendors will keep testing license boundaries against their user base.
- If the pattern holds, open-source infrastructure companies become standard targets for both growth equity and buyout firms, with licensing strategy increasingly shaped by investor return requirements rather than community norms alone.
The trend: Open-source infrastructure vendors are scaling through ever-larger institutional rounds while their license models oscillate under the pull of commercialization.