Aerospike, a NoSQL database company, just secured a hefty $100 million Series E funding round led by Sumeru Equity Partners. 

Existing investor Alsop Louie Partners also joined the round. 

Aerospike's journey began in 2009 as a key-value store catering to the ad tech industry. Since then, the company has broadened its offerings significantly.

Today, its flagship product is a NoSQL database optimized for real-time use cases at a massive scale. 

The company strategically expanded its capabilities in 2022, first with document support, followed by the introduction of graph and vector functionalities – crucial features for building real-time AI and machine learning applications. 

"Our core mission is to be a real-time data platform that handles data at truly unlimited scale," explained Aerospike CEO Subbu Iyer.

"We're fortunate to have customers who either started big with us or scaled their operations on our platform. This validates our core belief: real-time data access is critical across virtually every industry.  Our founding principles revolve around delivering real-time performance with limitless data scalability at the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) in the market." 

Aerospike's ability to fulfil this promise stems partly from its unique hybrid memory architecture.

This approach combines the speed of RAM for data access with the capacity of fast flash storage, or any combination of the two, offered as both a hosted platform and on-premises deployment options.

Notably, Aerospike's competitor, Redis, recently acquired Speedb with a similar goal – to provide cost-effective solutions for customers. 

Aerospike boasts an impressive client list, including Airtel, Transunion, Snap, and even TechCrunch's parent company, Yahoo. 

The current boom in AI is driving significant interest in Aerospike's solutions, and this new funding round positions them to capitalize on this trend.

As expected, the company plans to leverage the fresh capital to accelerate its AI-related innovations, particularly focusing on enhancing its graph and vector capabilities.  Iyer hinted at the potential for combining these functionalities in the future. 

"There are exciting synergies between graph and vector capabilities," he said. "Imagine searching for a specific document. You could leverage vector search to find embeddings stored in a vector database, then use a graph to identify similar documents based on relationships and connections." 

This strategic vision is precisely what attracted investors. While Aerospike wasn't under immediate financial pressure, Iyer acknowledged the vast opportunity before them.  Sumeru Equity Partners' co-founder and managing director, George Kadifa, echoed this sentiment. 

"AI is revolutionizing the global economy, creating new avenues for growth and innovation," he stated.

"Aerospike, with its impressive customer base and unparalleled performance at scale, is ideally positioned to become a cornerstone for the next generation of real-time AI applications."