Redpanda raises $100M as streaming information demand grows

Redpanda is seeing main progress for its streaming information platform, fueled partly by the persevering with want for real-time information and new use circumstances in synthetic intelligence (AI).

Immediately the corporate introduced it has raised $100 million in a collection C funding spherical, bringing whole funding for the San Francisco-based startup to $165 million. The brand new funding represents a giant uplift from the $50 million collection B Redpanda secured in February 2022.

Redpanda’s streaming information platform permits firms to gather, retailer and analyze information in actual time. A key a part of the corporate’s progress and success is how it’s enabling organizations throughout completely different business verticals to profit from streaming information. Particularly, Redpanda is discovering robust use by with synthetic intelligence (AI) and machine studying (ML) distributors, together with generative AI picture era service Midjourney.

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Redpanda is appropriate with the favored open-source Apache Kafka streaming know-how. The corporate claims it offers higher efficiency and simpler administration for real-time use circumstances than aggressive alternate options.

“From a market perspective we mainly quintupled income final 12 months, and we began successful each deal,” Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Redpanda, instructed VentureBeat. “So the thought right here is to gasoline the expansion, we’re persevering with the funding in what we see as the way forward for streaming.” 

How Redpanda is enabling real-time AI/ML workloads 

Enabling real-time AI/ML information pipelines is a key use case for Redpanda.

Gallego stated that there’s a frequent sample throughout the completely different AI/ML firms Redpanda works with. When a person interacts with a generative AI service like Midjourney, they enter a textual content immediate. The immediate in flip accesses an API on the particular service, which then generates a outcome. As a part of the method, all of the person prompts are recorded in a knowledge storage system. More and more that system is a real-time streaming system like Redpanda.

The streamed prompts are used to assist allow real-time inference, in addition to to assist with further coaching.

“Redpanda has been utilized in a bunch of AI/ML use circumstances [because it’s] a super-scalable storage engine for real-time ML,” Gallego stated. “That’s actually the place Redpanda suits, as there simply aren’t many storage engines that may sustain with the volumes of information that these fashions are demanding in actual time.”

Apache Iceberg help is coming and it’s a giant deal

Wanting forward, one space the place Redpanda is working to offer expanded capabilities is with help for Apache Iceberg.

Iceberg is an open-source information lake desk format that has change into more and more common lately, gaining the help of distributors together with Cloudera, Snowflake and Google.

Gallego defined that customers hook up with Redpanda by way of a Kafka API, as a result of that’s how individuals eat and produce information. Going a step additional, Redpanda has a tiered storage format so customers can preserve information regionally in addition to add information to a information lake. Redpanda is now engaged on enabling Iceberg help so the information loaded into the information lake will likely be formatted in a manner that may be simply accessed by way of SQL question engines.

“We successfully make the information lake real-time, and the format that we add to the information lake will likely be Apache Iceberg, so {that a} person can go from a stream to SQL in seconds,” he stated.