Investing in Upstash

The serverless platform shift is unfolding at a rapid pace. By that, we mean services that scale to zero, are globally distributed, and scale up based on demand. Having spent the last few years studying this market, we observed two key drivers behind the adoption of this platform shift — one architectural, and the other organizational.

First, application logic is becoming event-driven for new apps, necessitated by high volume and low-latency communication between third-party APIs and microservices. The benefit is that each service can scale up and down independently, but it requires an elastic caching or queuing mechanism to buffer the interactions between services. What’s more, because modern platforms like Vercel, Fly.io, and Netlify are serverless in nature, it pushes all the data services in the stack to be serverless, as well. 

Second, the “no DevOps” effort is particularly appealing for organizations aiming to minimize the operational overhead related to scaling and maintenance. It allows for a leaner web team structure without sacrificing feature velocity, and truly gives developers the freedom to build for customer value, instead of managing infrastructure. 

About a year ago, we started seeing Upstash show up as a popular key-value store choice for new applications. Developers loved the intuitive onboarding and the meticulous design of the SDKs. By relying on Upstash as the extended devops team to handle scaling and reliability, product teams can focus more of their time on things that create a delightful end-user experience. A year later, Upstash powers caching and messaging for tens of thousands of production applications across four different products.

Many popular AI applications also rely on Upstash’s rate limiting and caching SDK when working through the quirks of OpenAI’s SLA. They also just unveiled a truly serverless vector data store that’s native to the modern web stack and capable of supporting a large amount of data with great performance and sleek developer experience (the thing about Upstash that first caught our attention). 

Building such a highly reliable and scalable data fabric requires a team with deep distributed systems knowledge, as well as a strong database background. This is exactly what founders Enes, Mehmet, and Bilal bring to the table. Through years of experience building developer infrastructure, they realized the importance of a robust cloud offering and a data platform that can scale and support multiple use cases from key-value stores to search. More importantly, their unique product instinct and taste for what developers love has positioned them uniquely in the market. 

As more application logic disseminates into transactional backends (as explained in this blog post), we believe there’s a huge need for an entirely serverless data layer to power development teams with reliable, fast, and easy-to-use products for all the transitions. 

That’s why we’re so proud to invest in Upstash, and to help their team build this serverless future where more application developers can bring their dream apps to fruition!