Our investment in Aiven: the backbone of open source innovation
Modern enterprise quietly reached a remarkable milestone in January 2021. For the first time ever, the adoption of open source database management services superseded equivalent commercial products. Data management problems are now being met, more often than not, by open source solutions.
But for Oskari, Hannu, Mika, Heikki, and the rest of the team at Aiven this was no surprise. Since 2016, the Aiven team has been busy creating open source and cloud infrastructure technologies for companies ahead of the curve. Now, as more businesses begin to catch up, it’s never been a more exciting time for the Helsinki-based start-up.
That’s why Atomico is pleased to announce our investment in Aiven, which joins Varjo, Wolt, Rovio and Supercell to become another Finnish technology company that we’re delighted to partner with. Aiven provides seamless, open source data infrastructure experiences, working with companies to help developers do what they love: build great applications. By joining the dots between multiple open source solutions, Aiven helps companies dealing with data to build fully functional open source infrastructure no matter where they are.
As every engineer knows, linking multiple solutions and servicing them on a continuous basis is easier said than done. If managed in-house, hosting systems under a single umbrella can impose a heavy operational burden. There are issues of setup, availability, security, and site reliability engineering. And it’s notoriously difficult to hire talent that can handle everything while staying ahead of the innovation curve. Worse still, open source technologies provided by major public cloud providers can be complicated to use and pose issues of lock-in or geo-fencing that make it difficult to deploy software to a global customer base.
These challenges can be daunting to any company. But in ten minutes or less, and with just a few clicks, Avien’s customers can have an open source data infrastructure that is both multi-cloud and multi-region deployable. From Apache Kafka to PostgreSQL, Aiven provides ten best-in-class open source technologies on five clouds and across 90 regions. Scalable by nature, companies using Aiven can spin up or down in minutes according to their needs. Aiven ensures end-to-end security, setup and maintenance, and monitors the services 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
Put simply: Aiven just works.
Since its founding in 2016, Aiven has helped the teams of multinational companies including Comcast, Atlassian, Auchan, Decathlon and Toyota build open source powered apps and has grown the team to over 120 in offices in Helsinki, Boston, Berlin, and Sydney.
Open source is well on its way to becoming the rule, not the exception. That’s why, even though Aiven has already achieved so much, we know they are still only just getting started.
We can’t wait to see what’s next.
