Redis, the company behind the popular in-memory data store often used as a cache, vector database, or streaming engine, today announced the release of Redis 8. With this release, the company focuses on Redis as a vector database for AI use cases and introduces AI Copilot, which helps developers search and write code faster with Redis documents.
The company is also adding new integrations to make it easier for developers to get data into Redis without using third-party services, and is leveraging its acquisition of Speedb to launch Redis Flex.
Redis CEO Rowan Trollope described this release as the company’s biggest release to date. If you’ve been following along, you may remember that Redis announced some licensing changes earlier this year. They moved from open source BSD to a dual licensing scheme using the Redis Source Available License (RSALv2) and the Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). The main goal of this transition is essentially the same as every other open source company that has recently changed their license: to prevent the big cloud providers from offering hosting services on top of these open source projects. Of course, you can buy a license (Microsoft did).
What’s interesting here is that Trollope claims that Redis was essentially self-censoring before the license change. “The license was actually stifling a lot of innovation in the company,” he says. “You know, we had this problem where everything we put into open source was being taken away by Google and Amazon for free and sold to (essentially) their customers who had a monopoly advantage. So changing the license was like breaking a dam. And behind the dam was a huge reservoir of innovation that the company had built up.”
Trollope called Redis 8 a complete overhaul of Redis and a “blockbuster summer release” for the company. He said the release is a testament to the project’s raison d’etre: speed. But Redis is also increasingly popular with generative AI developers looking for a fast vector database to innovate on top of their underlying models, for example through search-augmented generation (RAG), he said.
But what’s even more interesting is that many developers are now using Redis to accelerate (and reduce costs) inference for fast, semantic caching. This brings Redis back to where it started as a popular caching tool. Redis is seeing developers save 30% to 90% on inference costs.
“We’ve been watching developers closely and trying to improve the product experience by integrating technologies into different stacks, different frameworks like LangChain, OpenAI, Llama, etc. to make sure we’re delivering a great experience,” Trollope said.
Another thing that the license change allowed was to bring features that were previously in Redis Stack directly into Redis 8 Community Edition. Because it was under the BSD license, Redis was previously unable to put these features into Redis Core. Now there is no longer a distinction between Redis Core and Redis Stack. Instead, there is Redis Community Edition.
In addition to these key AI features, the company is also announcing Redis Flex for those who want to run their Redis cache on flash drives instead of in-memory. The company already offers Redis on flash, and Redis Flex is essentially the next version based on the company’s acquisition of Speedb earlier this year. Flex can run on DRAM and SSDs, making it significantly cheaper to run than traditional versions of Redis, which have always been in-memory databases and therefore relied on more expensive memory. Redis claims that Flex will allow enterprises to reduce their data caching costs by up to 80%. This feature will be available in public preview soon.
Hiring new employees for IPO
It’s no secret that Redis is still hoping for an IPO. As Trollope exclusively told TechCrunch, the company recently hired Tony Tiscornia, formerly of Coupa, as its new CFO, and Diane Honda, who joined from Barracuda Networks, as its new chief administrative officer. “When the market favors more IPOs, we’re financially ready. In fact, the market is more important,” Trollope said. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned about pre-IPO startups, it’s that when you hire a new CFO—especially someone who oversaw a previous IPO, as Tiscornia did at Coupa in 2016—they definitely move toward an IPO.
