Aiven
More info
- Creator
- Oskari Saarenmaa, Hannu Valtonen
- Founded
- Type
- Managed data platform (DBaaS)
- Website
- aiven.io
A Finnish company that runs open-source databases for others — PostgreSQL, Kafka, OpenSearch and more — as a managed service across several clouds.
Founded in 2016 in Helsinki by Oskari Saarenmaa, Hannu Valtonen and a couple of colleagues from the operations world. The business idea is narrow and clear: take the most popular open data engines, handle upgrades, backups, failover and monitoring for the customer, and let them choose whether it runs on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or DigitalOcean.
The point is to escape both cloud-vendor lock-in and the chore of administering a Kafka cluster yourself. It reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2021–22 during the data-infrastructure buying spree. It contributes actively back to the projects it sells, not least the Valkey fork of Redis.