The funding train that has been making stops around the database world lately officially arrived in the caching segment this morning after Redis Labs Inc. announced a $15 million investment led by Bain Capital Ventures and Carmel Ventures to seize the exploding demand for its namesake key-value store. The cash infusion marks a welcome change of gears from the previous rounds.

Unlike other recently funded database startups such as MongoDB Inc. and Couchbase Inc. that have also taken up the brand of their systems, the Israel-based Redis Labs is not the original creator of its technology. That represents a departure from past investment preferences in this space that reflects the position of Redis itself, which is likewise entirely different than its peers.

At least in function, anyway. The project is available under an open-source license much like MongoDB and Couchbase and takes the same pairing-based approach as the latter towards storing information. The main difference is that Redis is designed not to compete but rather to complement traditional data stores.

The system is typically used to keep the most frequently accessed subset of records from a service readily available in memory to avoid the overhead of pulling data off the slower back-end systems on which the primary database runs. The result is a potentially orders-of-magnitude speed increase for users, which Redis Labs improves further with its commercial version of the project.

The distribution is available in hosted form or as a standalone install that organizations can set up in their on-premise environments to automate operational tasks such as adding more hardware to an implementation or recovering failed servers that require special effort when using vanilla Redis. The project’s dominant position in the caching category has helped the startup to attract nearly 5,000 paying customers the last few years, including familiar names such as Docker Inc. and Bleacher Report.

The new funding, which also saw the participation of Silicon Valley Bank, will help Redis Labs cope with that demand. With a lack of any real competition – a luxury that practically no one else can boast in the ultra-competitive database world – it’s the startup’s game to lose.

Photo via FIAP