Redis (company)

Not the inventors of the technology, but the ones who commercialized it

It is important to separate two things that are easy to confuse. One is the Redis technology itself, an in-memory key-value database written by the Italian programmer Salvatore Sanfilippo and released as open source in 2009. The other is the company this entry is about, founded by Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman in 2011 under the name Garantia Data. Bengal and Shoolman did not write the technology. They saw that a popular open-source project also needed a commercial body to maintain it, offer a managed cloud version and enterprise support, and fund further development. In 2014 the company changed its name to Redis Labs, and in 2021 it shortened it to just Redis. But legally and organizationally it always was, and remains, an entity separate from the code itself.

Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman: veteran entrepreneurs

Ofer Bengal, born in Tel Aviv, was already a serial entrepreneur when he founded Garantia Data. In 1989 he founded RiT Technologies, which went public on Nasdaq, and in 2000 Mobile Economix, which was sold in 2003. Yiftach Shoolman, formerly president of Crescendo Networks, joined as co-founder and chief technology officer (CTO). Their division of roles, Bengal on the business side and Shoolman on the technical side, stayed stable for more than a decade. Today Bengal serves as the company's chairman and Shoolman as its president, and both are still involved in running it.

Funding: $347 million and a valuation of more than two billion

According to reports, Redis raised a total of about $347 million over several rounds, from a $4 million seed round in 2012 to a $110 million Series G in April 2021 led by Tiger Global Management and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which put the company's valuation at more than two billion dollars. Between rounds it was also backed by Goldman Sachs (2017) and Francisco Partners (2019). As of the mid-2020s, the company had not yet gone public and remained private.

In July 2026, Calcalist reported layoffs of dozens of employees in Israel, with an estimate that about 70 employees would be affected. According to the report, the company does not plan to close its development center in Tel Aviv and continues to see it as part of its operations.

2024: the core leaves BSD

On 20 March 2024, Redis announced a significant change. Starting with version 7.4, the core of Redis itself, not only its advanced modules, would be released under the RSALv2 and SSPLv1 licenses instead of the three-clause BSD license it had carried since the beginning. According to the company's announcement, the main reason was that large cloud providers were offering managed Redis services based directly on its open-source code without giving back part of the value to the project's development. The new licenses restrict competitive commercial use of the code but leave it available and free for ordinary use. The company explicitly acknowledged that the move meant Redis no longer met the Open Source Initiative's official definition of open source.

The response: Valkey, and then a partial return

The move set off a wave of criticism in the developer community, which saw it as a breach of the trust built around a long-standing open-source project. The Linux Foundation responded in 2024 by creating Valkey, a free fork based on the last version of Redis under the BSD license, backed by companies such as AWS, Google and Oracle. In December 2024, Sanfilippo himself returned to the company as a "Redis evangelist." In May 2025, under CEO Rowan Trollope, Redis announced a partial countermove: adding the AGPL license, an open-source license that is officially recognized by the OSI, as a third option alongside the two earlier ones, starting with version 8. The step did not undo the 2024 change, but it gave the project back an official way to label itself open source.