Cloud computing, open-source software and SaaS (software-as-a-service) are three technology megatrends. Cloud computing alone is a massive market expected to reach $832.1 billion by 2025 according to MarketsandMarkets. The open-source services market is expected to reach $66.3 billion over the same time period.
One company that sits at the center of those trends is Aiven, the Helsinki, Finland-based company that helps businesses manage their open-source data infrastructure in the Cloud. The fast-growing company positions itself as providing the best open-source data technologies into managed cloud services on all public clouds.
“We started building Aiven six years ago with my co-founders [Mike Eloranta, Heikki Nousiainen and Hannu Valtonen]. We’re all [software]engineers by training having worked on infrastructure, security, databases, private Cloud—all of the infrastructure that makes the Internet work,” says Oskari Saarenmaa, Aiven CEO.
He likens the available open-source software systems as great polished tools with lots of sharp edges. They allow you to build things if you know what you're doing, but can also be very time consuming for developers who may also be prone to making mistakes along the way, some of which may be very costly.
Saarenmaa and is co-founders saw the emergence of these trends and the challenges businesses face when things break. “That breakage is very visible and sometimes quite confusing because you might not really understand the stack of different systems that are sitting underneath it. We thought we could make life a lot easier for companies by solving these problems and saw the Cloud as being a platform that allows us to combine all of the best bits of these capabilities,” says Saarenmaa.
Aiven’s cloud-native solutions allow businesses to focus on delivering customer value while they take care of their data infrastructure. Through its Cloud-based subscription, the company provides a fully managed service for some of the most popular open-source software with the ability to use those technologies on the public cloud of their choice.
Saarenmaa and his three co-founders bootstrapped the business and surprisingly launched the company via Twitter. “We didn't have anybody to tell us don't do this because building this is hard or launch it on Twitter because it doesn't make sense,” says Saarenmaa. They just did it and found their first customer via Twitter. Equally surprising, their first customer was a Mexican trucking company, pointing to the universality of the problem they were addressing and the general appeal of the service across regions or industries.
Today, Aiven is a global company with 200 employees with a valuation of over $800 million based on its most recent $100 million funding round. In total, the company has raised $150 million in venture capital from top VCs in Silicon Valley (IVP) and Europe (Atomico, Earlybird, Lifeline). It operates on three continents with headquarters in Helsinki and offices in Berlin, Boston, Toronto and Sydney. Their customers now include the likes of Toyota, Comcast, Atlassian, OVO Energy, Eurostar and GOV.UK to name a few.
Saarenmaa attributes Aiven’s success to his and his fellow founders’ deep understanding of and commitment to the open-source developer community that comes from having been one of them, as well as for the collaborative nature of his team. “When we went from the founding team to having the first employees, we always tried to bring in people who shared the same values, shared the same mindset of how things should be built. I think we've been very well aligned as a team. We’ve stuck to the core values that I started with and that's helped us make the journey,” says Saarenmaa.
Saarenmaa is a veteran of the Helsinki tech community and experienced entrepreneur having graduated from the University of Helsinki and worked as a software engineer for several of Finland’s most innovative companies, including Nokia, Exomi and F-Secure. After an eight-year stint at F-Secure, he co-founded systems engineering consultancy, Taisia Ltd.
He then went on to co-found and become the CEO of Ohmu Ltd, a software development boutique that provided software and systems development consulting for medium to large corporations and public organizations, with a focus on scaling large, highly available database systems using open-source software.That experience managing large scale relational databases led to the idea for Aiven in 2015.
As for the future, Saarenmaa says that there's a tremendous appetite for these cloud services and that these technologies are universally applicable for a wide range of companies and industries, providing plenty of runway for the company.
“The truth of the matter is that most companies out there still haven't made the pivot to use the cloud to build data intensive applications. We want to provide the best open-source data technologies in a very, easy-to-access, frictionless manner to more different kinds of organisations out there, so they can have better business outcomes and build what matters to them,” concludes Saarenmaa.
Aiven Builds Fast-Growing Open-Source Managed Cloud Services Subscription Business - Forbes
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