Congratulations to Aiven, Finland’s newest Unicorn
When we first invested into Aiven and led their $100 million Series C in March of this year, we already knew that we had the privilege to join a very special group of people and a true rocketship made in Finland. However, little did we know that it would only be less than 7 months later that we would have the honor to congratulate Oskari, Hannu, Heikki, Mika and the rest of the amazing Aiven team on becoming the latest European unicorn 🦄🦄🚀
With that, we are incredibly excited to announce today that Aiven has raised an internal extension of the Series C, bringing the total round size to $160 million, co-led by our friends at IVP and World Innovation Labs at a $2 billion valuation. Atomico is also doubling down as part of this heavily oversubscribed internal round and we are thrilled to continue to support this great company at the intersection of two generational mega trends, data & open source.
Why are we so excited about Aiven beyond the fact that they exhibit some of the best SaaS metrics we have seen at their stage? You can read our detailed summary about this incredible founding team and company here. To recap, data is changing the way we live our lives, how businesses do business, how consumers consume. And while software may be eating the world, open source is eating software.
Based on that, it should not come as a surprise that increasing numbers of companies are shifting critical infrastructure to the cloud, and in doing so are making use of new and more complex technologies and distributed systems to build their applications. According to DB-Engines, open source databases are now more popular than closed source databases, it is increasingly common for businesses to adopt multi-database deployments and combine open source databases and technologies. Setting up and managing these services is time consuming and difficult, and keeping them running requires expert engineers and DevOps with a specific skill set and willingness to be contacted at all hours if any issues occur. These engineers are expensive and difficult to hire and, as such, most companies are unable to attract the required talent and unwilling to use core developer time for this purpose.
Enter Aiven, the leading provider of Open Source Data Infrastructure. In a nutshell, Aiven offers managed open source data technologies, like PostgreSQL, Kafka, and M3, on all major clouds to allow developers to do what they do best: create applications. Meanwhile, Aiven does what they do best: manage cloud data infrastructure. Globally, deployed in minutes, beautiful and fully automated.
At Atomico, we remain very excited about continuing to support the growth journey of Aiven and at the same time to double down on Finland as a core European technology hub - we are proud to have partnered with every VC-backed unicorn that has emerged from this Nordic powerhouse to date, and Aiven is no exception!
