Dragonfly, a startup developing a ‘drop-in’ replacement for Redis, raises $21M

Oded Poncz and Roman Gershman experienced the pain of managing and scaling Redis, the open source database, in their previous engineering roles. The pair worked together both at Google and Ubimo, and Roman was a principal on Amazon’s ElastiCache service.

“Developers are fed up with hand holding their infrastructure,” Poncz told TechCrunch in an email interview. “For the database industry, the primary challenge is keeping pace with the performance demands of modern applications while keeping operations simple enough for the majority of developers.”

In an attempt to solve some of the challenges that they encountered as developers, Poncz and Gershman created Dragonfly. A drop-in replacement for Redis, Dragonfly is, as Poncz describes, a “high-scale, real-time” database designed to simplify production while boosting app performance.

“Redis was created 14 years ago, and while the amount of data the average application consumes has grown dramatically since then, the processing capabilities of Redis’ … processing model have not kept pace,” Poncz said. “By contrast, Dragonfly [can] support millions of operations per second and terabyte size data volumes from each instance.”

Poncz claims that Dragonfly, on the whole, can deliver a faster user experience, help save money on hardware costs and reduce operational complexity owing to the less complicated work required to maintain it. “Dragonfly has a unique caching algorithm paired with a multi-threaded processing model … makine it up to 25x more performant and much easier to scale than Redis,” he said.

The jury’s out on that — TechCrunch can’t independently confirm those claims. But for what it’s worth, the open source Dragonfly, which reached version 1.0 this week, already has some uptake — and investment.

Poncz claims that “thousands” of users have deployed Dragonfly for their applications. And the eponymous startup Poncz and Gershman co-founded to commercialize it, Dragonfly, has raised $21 million to date from Redpoint and Quiet Capital across seed and Series A rounds.

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Poncz says that the funding is being put toward expanding Dragonfly’s developer team and product R&D, specifically improving Dragonfly’s architecture to handle larger and more sophisticated workloads.

Satish Dharmaraj, the managing director at Redpoint, had this to say via email: “As applications and users become more globally distributed and edge computing continues to grow, so too will the market for in-memory data stores. Dragonfly’s architecture is differentiated and it’s a really exciting time for the in memory datastore market which we expect will continue to boom with increasingly distributed apps.”

Dragonfly plans to double its seven-person workforce by the end of the year.