Fresh Ink! Welcoming DragonflyDB, The Modern In-Memory Datastore

The ink: DragonflyDB’s $21M in new funding

Investors: Satish Dharmaraj and Jordan Segal

The scoop: DragonflyDB is rethinking what an in-memory datastore should look and behave like, with the goal of building something significantly more performant and easier to scale than Redis.

Their goal is to redesign the engine using novel algorithms and data structures, innovating around lockless multithreading, memory structures, caching algorithms, and snapshotting to provide a simple, cost-efficient, and reliable in-memory store that delights the engineering community.

What they’re tackling: For the most part, today’s in-memory datastores are clunky and cumbersome.  They’re not built for multi-tenant users, the cloud native world, or a distributed computing architecture. Dragonfly, however, effectively partitions the keyspace of the memory store between threads, so each thread manages its own slice of data. Dragonfly is also able to guarantee atomicity and uses scalable hashing on persistent memory to create more efficient data structures.

The Deep Dive: Dragonfly is specifically designed for the modern multi-tenant and cloud native world, including many technical advancements that allows it to achieve 25x performance and 30% memory efficiency relative to Redis. However, its main advantage is in its simplicity and ease-of-scaling, and its ability to fully leverage the latest hardware advancements for modern cloud workloads. Dragonfly can support millions of QPS on a single instance for improved performance and lower costs. Dragonfly will also leverage true pay-as-you-use pricing, unlike its managed service counterparts that require DevOps capacity provisioning, management, and configuration.

Investor input: Databases, simply put, are extremely technically challenging and the best database companies have exceptional technical talent at the helm. We saw something truly special with DragonflyDB’s founding team. Since May 2022 when they launched their initial product, Dragonfly, it has blossomed into a community project with over 17,000 Github stars, over 40 contributors, and a growing Discord community (reaching the 10K GitHub stars milestone in just 75 days!)  Co-founders Roman Gershman and Oded Poncz met while working at Google+, and when Oded left Google to found location intelligence technology company Ubimo, Roman went with him as Ubimo’s first engineer and Chief Architect. We’re thrilled to have Quiet Capital also joining on this exciting journey and we can’t wait for all the exciting milestones still to come!