Waspfly, which is developing a ‘drop-down’ replacement for Redis, has raised $21m

Oded Ponch and Roman Gershman experienced the pain of managing and scaling Redis, an open source database, in their early engineering careers. The pair worked together at both Google and Ubisoft, and Roman was a principal at Amazon’s Elasticsearch service.

“Developers are fed up with hand-holding their infrastructure,” Ponchez told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The primary challenge for the database industry is to keep up with the performance demands of modern applications and simplify operations for the majority of developers.”

Poncz and Gershman created Dragonfly in an attempt to solve some of the challenges they faced as developers. Redis’ drop-in replacement, Dragonfly, Poncz says, is a “high-volume real-time” database designed to simplify production while boosting application performance.

“Redis was created 14 years ago, and while the average amount of data consumed has grown exponentially since then, the processing capabilities of Redis’ … processing model have not kept pace,” Ponch said. “On the other hand, Dragonfly [can] They support millions of operations per second and terabyte-sized data volumes from each instance.

According to Poncz, Dragonfly generally provides a faster user experience, can save money on hardware costs and reduce operational complexity due to the complexity of maintaining it. “Dragonfly has a unique caching algorithm combined with a multi-threaded processing model… that makes it up to 25x more performant and much easier to scale than Redis,” he said.

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

Poncz says “thousands” of users have deployed Dragonfly for their applications. And popular startup Dragonfly, which Ponch and Gershman co-founded for business, has raised $21 million so far in seed and Series A rounds from Redpoint and Quiet Capital.

Poncz said the funding will be used to expand Dragonfly’s development team and product R&D, specifically to support the Dragonfly architecture to handle larger and more sophisticated workloads.

Satish Dharmaraj, managing director of Redpoint, said in an email: “As applications and users become more globally distributed and edge computing continues to grow, so will the in-memory storage market. Dragonfly’s architecture is diverse and it’s an exciting time in the in-memory data storage market that we expect to continue to grow with the growing number of applications.

Wasp Fly plans to double its workforce to seven by the end of the year.