Redis: The Israeli In-Memory Database Platform

Open-source database platform · Founded 2011 by Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman · HQ San Francisco, R&D Tel Aviv · $355M raised · $2B valuation (2021) · ~$300M ARR · 7,500+ customers · The in-memory data layer underneath modern internet architecture.

Redis at a Glance

Company	Redis Ltd. (formerly Redis Labs)
Founded	2011, Tel Aviv
Co-founders	Ofer Bengal (CEO) · Yiftach Shoolman (CTO)
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
R&D center	Tel Aviv, Israel
Product	In-memory data platform — cache, vector database, document database, streaming engine
Total funding	$355M across 8 rounds
Valuation	$2B (Series G, April 2021)
Revenue	~$300M ARR (est. 2026)
Customers	7,500+ including MasterCard, Dell, Fiserv, Home Depot, Microsoft, Costco, Gap
Employees	~1,450
Status	Private · IPO candidate

Bengal and Shoolman: Israeli Infrastructure Entrepreneurs

Ofer Bengal is a serial Israeli entrepreneur whose career arc spans aerospace, telecommunications, and data infrastructure. He began in the Israeli Air Force as an aerospace engineer, built an aerospace consulting firm, then founded RiT Technologies (Nasdaq: RITT), a provider of intelligent infrastructure management systems for data centers and telecommunications networks. Before Redis, Bengal also invented and licensed toy concepts to companies including Milton Bradley, Hasbro, and Tomy — a footnote that captures the range of the operator. Yiftach Shoolman, the CTO, previously co-founded Crescendo Networks, a WAN optimization company. Together they saw that the open-source Redis project — created by Italian developer Salvatore Sanfilippo — had become the most widely deployed in-memory data store on the internet, but lacked a commercial enterprise platform behind it.

They founded Redis Labs (later renamed Redis) in Tel Aviv in 2011 to build the commercial platform on top of the open-source project, offering managed cloud deployments, enterprise support, and advanced modules that extended Redis beyond simple caching into a multi-model database capable of serving as the real-time data layer for modern applications.

The Product: From Cache to Real-Time Data Platform

Redis started as the internet's caching layer — a fast in-memory key-value store that sits between applications and their primary databases, reducing latency from milliseconds to microseconds. That original use case still anchors the technology: Redis is deployed inside virtually every major internet-scale application architecture. But the commercial platform, Redis Enterprise, evolved far beyond caching. It now functions as a multi-model database supporting strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets, streams, JSON documents, time-series data, and — critically for the AI era — vector embeddings for similarity search.

The vector database capability, added in recent years, positions Redis as infrastructure for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures in AI applications — the pattern where a language model retrieves relevant context from a vector store before generating a response. This makes Redis one of the established infrastructure companies that can credibly claim a position in the AI stack without needing to pivot.

Redis Enterprise is available as a managed service across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, as well as downloadable software for on-premises deployment. In March 2024, Redis acquired Speedb, a database engine company, to expand capabilities beyond pure in-memory workloads.

The Funding Trajectory

Redis raised $355 million across eight rounds, with the cap table reading as a who's-who of growth-stage enterprise investors. Key rounds: $100 million Series F at over $1 billion (August 2020, led by TCV and Bain Capital Ventures, with Francisco Partners, Goldman Sachs Growth, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital), and $110 million Series G at $2 billion (April 2021, led by Tiger Global, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and TCV). The Series G also included a $200 million secondary transaction in which Tiger Global, SoftBank, and TCV acquired additional ownership.

The combined primary and secondary transaction of $310 million in the Series G round makes it one of the larger single-round capitalizations for an Israeli-founded database company. The $2 billion valuation has not been publicly refreshed since 2021, though the company's revenue growth to an estimated $300 million ARR and its positioning in the AI infrastructure stack suggest the figure is conservative.

Redis in the Israeli Data-Infrastructure Lineage

Israel has produced a disproportionate share of the world's data-infrastructure companies. Redis sits alongside the broader Israeli database-technology lineage that includes the SiSense business-intelligence platform that Gong founder Amit Bendov ran before founding his company. The Israeli R&D center in Tel Aviv remains a core engineering hub for Redis, and the company's technical DNA — high-performance systems programming, latency optimization, distributed-systems architecture — maps directly to the strengths of the Israeli engineering talent pool.

The Licensing Debate

In March 2024, Redis changed the license for the core Redis project from the permissive BSD license to a dual-license model (Redis Source Available License and Server Side Public License), restricting cloud providers from offering Redis as a managed service without a commercial agreement. The move generated controversy in the open-source community and spawned a fork called Valkey, backed by AWS, Google Cloud, and the Linux Foundation. The licensing shift is a commercial bet: Redis is trading community goodwill for revenue protection against hyperscalers who had been offering managed Redis services without paying Redis the company. The bet's outcome will be visible in whether enterprise customers stay on Redis Enterprise or migrate to Valkey-based alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Redis?
Ofer Bengal (CEO) and Yiftach Shoolman (CTO), both Israeli entrepreneurs, co-founded Redis Labs (now Redis) in Tel Aviv in 2011.

What does Redis do?
Redis provides an in-memory data platform used as a cache, vector database, document database, and streaming engine — the real-time data layer underneath internet-scale applications.

How much has Redis raised?
$355 million across eight rounds, reaching a $2 billion valuation in April 2021.

What is Redis's revenue?
Approximately $300 million ARR as of 2026.

Is Redis an Israeli company?
Redis was founded in Tel Aviv and maintains its R&D center there. Headquarters are in San Francisco.

What is the Redis vs Valkey situation?
In March 2024, Redis changed its open-source license. AWS, Google, and the Linux Foundation forked the project as Valkey. Redis Enterprise continues as the commercial product.

Who are Redis's competitors?
Dragonfly, KeyDB, Valkey (the open-source fork), and managed offerings from AWS (ElastiCache), Google (Memorystore), and Azure (Azure Cache).

Primary Sources

Redis company press releases on funding rounds (Series F–G). Globes and Tech.eu coverage of Israeli funding rounds. BusinessWire Series G announcement (April 2021). Forbes and Startup Nation Central company profiles. Tracxn and PitchBook funding data. Getlatka revenue estimates.