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 is doubling down on Redis as a vector database for AI use cases and is launching AI Copilot to help developers retrieve Redis documents and write code faster.
The company is also adding a new integration service, making it easier for developers to get data into Redis without using a third-party service, and is putting its Speedb acquisition to good use with the launch of Redis Flex.
Redis CEO Rowan Trollope called this the company’s biggest release yet. If you’ve been following along, you’ll remember that Redis announced some licensing changes earlier this year. It moved from the open source BSD system to a dual-licensing system, using Redis source license available (RSALv2) and the Server Public License (SSPLv1). The main goal of this change is the same as every other open source company that has recently changed its license: to prevent major cloud providers from offering hosted services based on these open source projects. They can, of course, buy a license (and Microsoft has done so).
What’s interesting here is that Trollope claimed that Redis was practicing self-censorship before the license change. “The license was stifling a lot of creativity in the company,” he said. “You know, we had this problem where anything we put in open source, Google and Amazon would take it for free and then sell it — or give it away, basically — to their customers with superior monopoly benefits. So changing the license was like breaking the dam. And what was behind the dam was this huge reservoir of creativity that the company was building up.”
Trollope described Redis 8 as a complete overhaul of Redis and the company’s “summer blockbuster.” He said that with this release, the company is moving back to the project’s raison d’être: speed. But at the same time, he said Redis has also seen increasing traction from generative AI developers looking for fast vector databases to innovate on top of foundational models with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), for example.
But what’s even more interesting is that many developers are now using Redis to speed up (and save) their inferences for immediate and semantic caching — which also brings Redis back to its roots as the popular caching tool it once was. Redis sees developers saving between 30% and 90% of their inference cost with this.
“We’ve been really following developers and trying to help make the experience of using our product better by doing things like integrating our technology into different stacks and different frameworks like LangChain, OpenAI, Llama, etc., to make sure they have a great experience,” Trollope said.
One of the things that the license change also allowed was to bring features that were previously in Redis Stack directly to Redis 8 Community Edition. Because it was licensed under the BSD license, Redis couldn’t put these features in Redis Core before. Now, there’s no longer a distinction between Redis Core and Redis Stack. It’s Redis Community Edition instead.
In addition to these cool AI features, the company has also announced Redis Flex, for those who want to run their Redis cache on flash drives instead of memory. The company already offered Redis on Flash, and Redis Flex is essentially the next version of this, based on the company’s acquisition of Speedb earlier this year. Flex can run on both DRAM and SSD, making it significantly cheaper than the traditional version of Redis, which has always been an in-memory database and therefore relied on more expensive memory. Redis claims that with Flex, businesses will be able to cut the cost of caching data by 80%. The feature will be released in public preview soon.
New hires on the way to IPO
It’s also no secret that Redis is still looking Towards IPOAs Trollope exclusively told TechCrunch, the company recently hired a new CFO, Tony Tiscorniawho previously served as CFO of Cuba, and a new Managing Director, Diane Honda“When the markets are favorable for more IPOs, we are financially prepared for that. It’s really about the markets,” Trollope said — and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about startups before an IPO, it’s that when they hire new CFOs, especially ones who have overseen previous IPOs like Tiscornia’s Coupa in 2016, they definitely lean toward an IPO.