Aiven Achieves $2B Unicorn Valuation with its Series C Extension

Aiven’s existing investors increase capital investment to double down the company’s exponential growth and global open-source innovation

SINGAPORE - Media OutReach - 26 October 2021 - Aiven, a software company that combines the best open-source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced a $60M Series C extension at a $2B valuation today, bringing the total Series C round to $160M. This extension brings Aiven's total funding to date to $210M. The round was co-led by existing investors World Innovation Lab and IVP, and with the participation from Atomico and others. In a testament to the growth and potential Aiven showcases in its capabilities, a number of investors increased their capital commitments to Aiven just seven months after the company's successful $100 million Series C.

As the latest unicorn of the Nordics, Aiven is experiencing growing revenue of over 100% year on year and aims to continue maximizing its growth in a journey to becoming the global category leader in managed cloud data infrastructure. Aiven currently has more than 230 employees scaling global hubs from Helsinki, reaching Berlin, Boston, Toronto and Sydney. Following the fundraise, the company will expand its reach in the Asia-Pacific region by opening an office in Singapore.

The move to expand to a South-East Asian (SEA) is influenced by the high momentum of digital transformation in the region. With more and more investments allocated to digitalization and open source software, the economic growth potential and access to talent are strong, making Singapore a key market for Aiven. Future regional expansion locations include Indonesia and Malaysia.

"This is an exciting step for Aiven on our journey and indicates that our team is successfully delivering on our mission to champion open source and make the lives of developers better in all that we do," said Oskari Saarenmaa, CEO and co-founder at Aiven. "The additional funding from our existing investors will allow us to rapidly expand our global footprint, significantly contribute to the open source community and support the growth of other tech startups."

In an effort to give back to the open source community, Aiven continues its open source investment with its recently launched open source program office, solely focused on contributing to the projects that are key to Aiven's customers. Additionally, Aiven will support promising entrepreneurs and launch its own startup program in December. The program participants will get access to Aiven's expertise and data platform for free for one year.

"IVP originally invested in Aiven in January of 2020 behind a belief that the company's outstanding product and platform would enable companies of all sizes to manage their exploding data needs easily and efficiently," said Eric Liaw, General Partner at IVP. "Under Oskari's leadership, the Aiven team is delivering tremendous value for their customers, and the proof is that the company has more than quadrupled since our original investment and growth is accelerating."

With Aiven's fully managed services for popular open source projects like Apache Kafka and Cassandra, OpenSearch, M3, PostgreSQL and more in the public cloud, businesses can enjoy a modern, fully-functional open source data infrastructure globally in minutes. According to a recent IDC whitepaper^[1], companies leveraging Aiven's offerings report a 340% ROI over three years thanks to reduced cost of using open source solutions, increased development team efficiency, as well as increased revenue through enhanced agility and scalability.

For more information on Aiven, visit https://aiven.io/.

About Aiven

Headquartered in Helsinki and hubs in Berlin, Boston, Toronto and Sydney, Aiven provides managed open source data technologies, like PostgreSQL, Kafka and OpenSearch, on all major clouds. Through Aiven, developers can do what they do best: create applications. Meanwhile, Aiven does what they do best: manage cloud data infrastructure. Aiven enables customers to drive business results from open source that trigger true transformations far beyond their own backyard. To learn more about Aiven, visit aiven.io and follow @aiven_io on Twitter.

#Aiven

About World Innovation Lab (WiL)

World Innovation Lab (WiL) is a US & Japan-based venture capital firm with capital from governments and leading global corporations in Japan and throughout Asia, including Sony, Suzuki, NTT, KDDI, and 7-Eleven. WiL helps US startups expand to Japan and Asia, and Japanese startups expand globally. With our corporate investors as partners, we invest in digital transformation. WiL direct company investments include Aiven, Asana, Auth0, DataRobot, Kong, MURAL, Sendbird, Wise, and Unqork. In addition to direct investment, WiL invests in exceptional venture funds - both established and emerging. Our mission is to be the bridge between startups and corporates across the globe - starting with Japan and the US. For more, visit wilab.com or twitter.com/wilabcom.

About IVP

Founded in 1980, IVP is one of the premier later-stage venture capital and growth equity firms in the United States. IVP has invested in over 400 companies, 126 of which have gone public. IVP is one of the top-performing firms in the industry and has a 40-year IRR of 43.1%. IVP specializes in venture growth investments, industry rollups, founder liquidity transactions, and select public market investments. IVP investments include such notable companies as Amplitude (AMPL), AppDynamics (CSCO), Attentive, Brex, Coinbase (COIN), Compass (COMP), CrowdStrike (CRWD), Datadog (DDOG), Discord, Dropbox (DBX), GitHub (MSFT), Glossier, Grammarly, HashiCorp, Hims & Hers (HIMS), Hopin, Klarna, LegalZoom (LZ), Looker (GOOGL), Marketo (MKTO), MasterClass, Mindbody (MB), MuleSoft (CRM), Netflix (NFLX), Niantic, Podium, Robinhood (HOOD), Rubrik, Slack (WORK), Snap (SNAP), Supercell (Tencent), Twitter (TWTR), UiPath (PATH), Wise (WISE), ZipRecruiter (ZIP), and Zynga (ZNGA). For more information, visit www.ivp.com or follow IVP on Twitter: @ivp.