Redis, Inc.
Company History
Redis History: Founding, Growth & Key Milestones
Founded 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel
When was Redis founded?
Redis was founded in 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel by Salvatore Sanfilippo, Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman, making it 15 years old.
- Founded
- 2011
- Founding place
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Founders
- Salvatore Sanfilippo, Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman
- Headquarters today
- Mountain View, California, United States
- Milestones documented
- 11 (2009–2026)
- Current CEO
- Rowan Trollope
- Acquisitions
- 4
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2009 | Salvatore Sanfilippo Releases Open-Source Redis |
| 2011 | Garantia Data Founded by Bengal and Shoolman |
| 2014 | Company Rebranded to Redis Labs |
| 2015 | Salvatore Sanfilippo Joins Redis Labs |
| 2018 | Commons Clause Licence |
| 2019 | Introduction of Redis Streams and Multi-Model Features |
| 2020 | Sanfilippo Steps Down & $100M Series F Unicorn Round |
| 2021 | Rebranded to Redis & $110M Series G at $4 Billion Valuation |
| 2023 | Rowan Trollope Appointed CEO |
| 2024 | Speedb Acquisition & Dual Source-Available Licensing |
| 2026 | Surpasses $300M ARR Driven by GenAI Vector Caching |
- Where was Redis founded?
- Redis was founded in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2011.
- Who founded Redis?
- Redis was founded by Salvatore Sanfilippo, Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman.
- When did Redis start?
- Redis was founded in 2011.
- How old is Redis?
- Redis is 15 years old as of 2026.
Founding Story
In 2009 Salvatore Sanfilippo was building LLOOGG, a real-time web analytics tool, in Sicily and found MySQL too slow for his write load. He wrote an in-memory data server in C, named it Redis (REmote DIctionary Server) and open-sourced it. Adoption spread quickly among web companies. Garantia Data, founded in 2011, began offering hosted Redis and became Redis Labs; Sanfilippo joined it in 2015, stepped back in 2020 and returned to Redis in late 2024.
Founders
Salvatore Sanfilippo
Salvatore Sanfilippo (known online as 'antirez') created Redis in 2009. Frustrated by the terrible performance of MySQL for real-time web analytics, he wrote the absolute first version of Redis in Tcl (and later C) to act as a lightning-fast, in-memory data store. He maintained the open-source project almost single-handedly for over a decade, refusing corporate pressure before stepping down in 2020. Salvatore Sanfilippo was born in 1977.
Ofer Bengal
Ofer Bengal co-founded Redis Labs (now Redis Inc.) in 2011. Realizing that Salvatore's brilliant open-source code had absolutely no enterprise-grade management or high-availability features, Bengal built a massive commercial company around it, successfully monetizing the world's most popular open-source database. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Yiftach Shoolman
Yiftach Shoolman co-founded Redis Labs in 2011 alongside Ofer Bengal. As the Chief Technology Officer, he architected the absolutely critical 'Redis Enterprise' software layer, adding the massive scaling, clustering, and high-availability features required to sell the database to Fortune 500 banks and tech giants. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Key Milestones
Salvatore Sanfilippo Releases Open-Source Redis
Developed in Sicily as an in-memory key-value store for web log analysis, Redis was open-sourced on GitHub in March 2009.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgGarantia Data Founded by Bengal and Shoolman
Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman established Garantia Data in Tel Aviv to provide automated cloud hosting for Redis.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgCompany Rebranded to Redis Labs
Adopted the name Redis Labs to emphasize its commitment to the in-memory technology ecosystem and multi-cloud DBaaS.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSalvatore Sanfilippo Joins Redis Labs
Redis Labs hired creator Salvatore Sanfilippo to lead open-source architecture while expanding commercial enterprise modules.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgCommons Clause Licence
Redis Labs added the Commons Clause to the licence of some Redis modules in August 2018.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgIntroduction of Redis Streams and Multi-Model Features
Expanded beyond caching into stream processing, JSON document storage, full-text search, and graph modeling.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSanfilippo Steps Down & $100M Series F Unicorn Round
Sanfilippo transitioned leadership to the community; Redis Labs raised $100M at a $1B+ valuation during the cloud migration boom.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgRebranded to Redis & $110M Series G at $4 Billion Valuation
Officially rebranded to Redis; raised $110M led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tiger Global, crossing $100M ARR.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgRowan Trollope Appointed CEO
Former Five9 CEO Rowan Trollope took the helm, prioritizing enterprise cloud ARR, profitability, and AI vector caching.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSpeedb Acquisition & Dual Source-Available Licensing
Acquired storage engine Speedb to launch Redis Flex; updated software licensing to RSALv2 and SSPL.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgSurpasses $300M ARR Driven by GenAI Vector Caching
Crossed $300 million in ARR, establishing Redis as the premier operational memory layer for enterprise AI agents.
Source: en.wikipedia.orgMajor Acquisitions
Speedb
2024Acquired Speedb, a high-performance RocksDB-compatible key-value storage engine, to build the next-generation Redis Flex hybrid flash memory architecture.
RDBTools (Alkaline Computing)
2019Acquired popular open-source Redis memory analysis and database visualization tool RDBTools to build Redis Insight.
Decodable
2025Real-time streaming data platform founded by Eric Sammer; announced at Redis Released in September 2025 to simplify feeding data into Redis.
Featureform
2025Feature store framework for defining and serving structured data to ML models and AI agents, acquired October 9, 2025.
Keep researching Redis
Redis Company History FAQ
What are the major historical milestones in the evolution of Redis and Redis, Inc.?
Key milestones: Redis open-sourced in 2009; Garantia Data founded in 2011 and later renamed Redis Labs; Sanfilippo joined in 2015; $110M Series G at a $2B+ valuation in 2021 and rename to Redis; Rowan Trollope named CEO in 2023; Speedb acquisition and RSALv2/SSPL license change in 2024; Redis 8 with AGPLv3 plus the Decodable and Featureform deals in 2025; $300M ARR announced in January 2026.
How did Salvatore Sanfilippo's release of Redis 1.0 in 2009 disrupt database engineering?
When Redis 1.0 was open-sourced on GitHub in 2009, its ability to execute over 100,000 operations per second in memory using native data structures (hashes, lists, sets) was an instant revelation for web developers struggling with slow relational SQL queries, sparking global viral adoption.
How did Redis become the #1 most loved and used database among developers?
In the annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Redis was voted the '#1 Most Loved Database' in the world for five consecutive years, praised by millions of engineers for its sub-millisecond speed, rock-solid stability, and intuitive commands.
How did Redis develop Active-Active multi-region replication in 2017?
In 2017, Redis Labs engineering teams in Tel Aviv invented the commercial implementation of Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) for Redis Enterprise, allowing databases to be written to simultaneously across multiple continents without data loss or locking delays.
How did the 2020 launch of Azure Cache for Redis Enterprise transform cloud distribution?
In 2020, Microsoft and Redis announced a landmark first-party partnership, building Redis Enterprise directly into Microsoft Azure as a native service, allowing Global 2000 enterprises to provision high-availability Redis Enterprise in a single click.
When did Salvatore Sanfilippo step down as open-source maintainer in 2020?
In June 2020, after 11 years of leading the project, Salvatore Sanfilippo retired from day-to-day open-source Redis maintenance, handing governance to a top Core Team of senior maintainers while writing a reflective farewell post celebrating the community's success.
What is Redis, Inc.'s strategic vision for the future of data infrastructure?
Redis is dedicated to being the foundational real-time data engine for the intelligent internet, powering microservices, high-frequency financial trading, autonomous AI agents, and real-time computing at sub-millisecond memory speed.
When and how was Redis originally created?
The open-source Redis database was created in 2009 by Italian software developer Salvatore Sanfilippo (known online as "antirez") in Sicily, Italy, who built an ultra-fast in-memory key-value data structure store in C to solve scalability bottlenecks for a web analytics startup.
When and where was the commercial company Redis (Redis Labs) founded?
The commercial company was founded in 2011 in Tel Aviv, Israel, by Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman under the original name Garantia Data, later rebranding to Redis Labs in 2014 and officially adopting the single name Redis in 2021.
What was Salvatore Sanfilippo’s relationship with Redis Labs?
In 2015, Redis Labs officially sponsored Salvatore Sanfilippo to work full-time on open-source Redis development; Sanfilippo led open-source engineering until stepping down as primary maintainer in June 2020 to pursue writing and other projects.
When did Redis achieve unicorn valuation status?
In August 2020, Redis closed a $100 million Series F funding round co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and TCV, valuing the company at over $1.0 billion, and expanded to over $2.0 billion in 2021.
What was the landmark license change in March 2024?
In March 2024, Redis transitioned from the three-clause BSD open-source license to a dual source-available license (RSALv2 and SSPLv1) starting with Redis 7.4, preventing cloud hyperscalers from repackaging Redis as a free managed service without commercial compensation.
How did the open-source community respond to the 2024 license change?
Following the license shift, the Linux Foundation and contributors forked the last BSD-licensed codebase to launch Valkey, while Redis focused on enhancing Redis Enterprise with proprietary vector search, active-active geo-replication, and enterprise security.
When did Rowan Trollope become CEO of Redis?
In February 2023, Rowan Trollope (former CEO of Five9 and longtime Cisco executive) succeeded founding CEO Ofer Bengal as Chief Executive Officer, leading Redis’s expansion into AI vector databases and hybrid cloud data platforms.
How did Redis evolve from a simple cache into an enterprise data platform?
Over its history, Redis expanded from a simple in-memory key-value cache into a multi-model primary database supporting JSON documents, probabilistic data structures (Bloom filters), Pub/Sub messaging, time-series data, and high-performance vector search for generative AI.
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