SaaS startup Aiven closes €8 million Series A funding to enhance cloud data platform and accelerate international growth

Aiven, a cloud computing startup that provides a managed cloud database and messaging services, has completed an €8 million Series A funding round to enhance its leading cloud data platform with more integrated solutions and to accelerate international growth. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital with participation from Lifeline Ventures and Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa. Hendrik Brandis, partner and co-founder of Earlybird, joins the Aiven board of directors as part of the transaction.

Founded in 2016 by Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen, Mika Eloranta, and Oskari Saarenmaa, the Helsinki, Finland-based Aiven is an ISO 27001 certified cloud data platform provider, operating managed open-source database, event streaming, cache, search, and graphing solutions for over 400 customers worldwide.  Aiven runs database and streaming systems such as PostgreSQL and Apache Kafka in all major clouds around the world.

“We see a tremendous number of companies around the world now implementing their new real-time data platforms in the cloud. The new funding will allow us to better cater to their requirements,” states Oskari Saarenmaa, co-founder and CEO at Aiven.

“Aiven’s ability to outcompete established market players and build a highly capital efficient international business is impressive. We’re eager to become a part of the story and continue growing the company,” discusses Brandis.

Aiven launched its data cloud in 2016 with a suite of the best open source data infrastructure services that now include the Apache Kafka event streaming engine and databases such as PostgreSQL and Apache Cassandra. Aiven services cover all the needs of complex internet applications and have earned the trust of a growing number of customers, such as Atlassian, Comcast and OVO Energy.

Committed to open source, Aiven recognizes the importance of the communities behind these projects and will step up its participation in them. This will mean creating new open source tools such as Kafka connectors as well as participating in the feature development and quality assurance of the core projects.

Aiven’s mission is to enable developers to focus on their core business and build great applications without worrying about software infrastructure. The next step in this journey is offering more integrated solutions on top of the individual building blocks that are currently available on Aiven’s data cloud, which will allow teams to build what they couldn’t imagine before.

Aiven services currently include seven Open Source database and messaging products available in more than 70 regions around the world, including all AWS, GCP and Azure regions. Aiven has offices in Helsinki, Finland and Boston, Massachusetts.