Data grid startup Hazelcast raises $21.5 million, helping this one-time 'submarine' emerge and get more recognition from developers with its database alternative

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Data grid startup Hazelcast raises $21.5 million, helping this one-time 'submarine' emerge and get more recognition from developers with its database alternative

Kelly Herrell   Hazelcast CEO

Hazelcast

Hazelcast CEO Kelly Herrell

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  • On Tuesday, Hazelcast announced it closed a $21.5 million round of funding led by C5 Capital.
  • Hazelcast is the company behind a popular open source data grid of the same name, which provides an high-performance, large-scale alternative to more traditional databases.
  • With the funding, Hazelcast plans to invest in cloud products and doubling its employee count.
  • Hazelcast CEO Kelly Herrell says that its strong developer community helped it grow so fast, and it's what made him want to join the company.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Hazelcast CEO Kelly Herrell says that any technology company faces three major risks: if the technology works, if customers will buy it, and if the company can be scaled.

Now, the first two risks are gone, Herrell says, and it's all about execution. On Tuesday, Hazelcast just announced another round of funding that should help with that. It closed $21.5 million round led by C5 Capital. Bain Capital Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital and Capital One Growth Ventures also participated. In total, Hazelcast has raised $37.5 million.

Hazelcast is an in-memory data grid company. Data grids are well-suited for managing applications that need especially high performance, especially at large scales. While they are similar to databases, they differ in how they store data, making them a popular choice for modern web apps at companies like TD Bank and T-Systems.

With the funding, Hazelcast plans to invest in multicloud initiatives - that is, making its products compatible with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, such that customers can pick and choose where to host their data.

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"We just have to talk to them about what it can power, and let them tell us where to run it," Herrell told Business Insider.

A 'submarine'

For some time, Herrell says, Hazelcast was somewhat like a submarine, in that it has been under the radar. But things have changed, he says.

He recalls that when he first joined Hazelcast, it only had one product. Now it has three products, and it has plans to double its employee count worldwide.

"The broader industry was largely unaware of us," Herrrell told Business Insider. "This is the year our submarine burst to the surface."

To that point, Herrell says, Hazelcast has a large and global developer community, as it started as an open source project - which is to say, a project that's free and available for anyone to use, download, or modify. That developer community was what attracted him to join the company as CEO in the first place. Previously, Herrell was at Brocade communications.

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Read more: VCs say these 19 startups for open-source software developers will blow up in 2019

"When I looked at that, my specialty is I love to catch new aggressive technology waves just as they're about to go mainstream and create that product category and be the category owner," Herrell said.

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