Memphis.dev looks to simplify event streaming with open source and SaaS products

Startups have been looking for ways to disrupt event streaming, popularized in the last decade by Kafka, the open source event streaming platform. Just this week we looked at Redpanda getting a $100 million Series C for its event streaming platform, and today Memphis.dev, an earlier-stage startup, announced a $5.5 million seed investment to support its open source project and SaaS offering called Memphis Cloud, which they are making generally available starting today.

Memphis co-founder and CEO Yaniv Ben Hemo says that the company was founded on the idea that streaming was too complicated, and they wanted to simplify it. He said they came from organizations dealing with massive amounts of data, where they struggled to get insights from it.

“The component that was usually the most challenging one was getting Kafka to absorb the massive amount of data that we ingested, and also what we call the Day 2 operations, which are all about how to take the raw data that we ingested and make it into something that the organization can do something with to create insights from it,” Ben Hemo told TechCrunch.

The company wanted to build a solution that helped solved these kinds of problems for developers building real-time streaming applications, and they built and open sourced this new message broker they called Memphis. He said they wanted to attack two key problems that they saw with streaming large amounts of data and building applications making use of that data.

“So the first part would be the management over the scalability, the maintenance that it requires, the amount of time that it takes and complexity to really implement such a technology or a solution within the organization.” The second part involved how to build applications that really take advantage of the data the engine was processing.

The founders started by building the open source project, and eventually building Memphis Cloud, which is geared toward enterprises with typical features like authentication and permissions, but they are also making it a serverless experience, making it easier to implement without worrying about the underlying resources required to run any particular application, while paying only for what you use. The company has also designed it to work on multiple platforms, including AWS and Google Cloud Platform for starters.

“We try to create as much alignment as we can between the commercial version and Memphis. But the commercial version is definitely more for enterprises, organizations that require serverless experience, and don’t want anything to do with infrastructure and scale and monitoring and stuff like that. So it really made sense for the community, as well as some other features that we simply were not able to deploy through the open source version, technically,” Ben Hemo said.

The company currently has 14 employees with two open recs, and as currently constituted has a pretty diverse group. He says he hopes to continue that along multiple dimensions of diversity, including geographical, as he builds the organization.

Today’s seed investment was led by Angular Ventures and Boldstart Ventures along with several prominent industry angels.