Hazelcast, the leading in-memory computing platform that delivers the System of Now, today announced it has closed a $21.5 million funding round led by new investor C5 Capital, a UK-based venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity, data analytics and cloud computing. Existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Earlybird Venture Capital and Capital One Growth Ventures also participated in the round. With this new investment, Hazelcast will accelerate its product roadmap and bolster go-to-market capabilities, including strategic partnering.

According to Gartner, "Digital business model imperatives are demanding cost-effective support for real-time analytics, hyperscale architectures and fast access to data demanded by digital business models, which in turn drives fast growth for most in-memory computing (IMC)-enabling technologies and IMC-enabled architectures."

"From the cloud to the internet of things, the macro trends hitting today's enterprises require a new approach to data processing for meeting the time-sensitive demands of data-centric applications," said Kelly Herrell, CEO of Hazelcast. "Hazelcast enables its customers to establish a System of Now through its platform that scales linearly and delivers the industry's fastest processing for stored and streaming data, leaving competitive offerings far behind as data sizes and processing loads grow."

A System of Now is an ultra-fast processing architecture for mission-critical applications where microseconds matter. The world's most data-centric companies complement their systems of record, such as databases, by creating a System of Now that operates in near real-time to accelerate applications, such as online stores, fraud detection, online trading and other customer-facing use cases. Unlike the disk-based designs used by systems of record, the System of Now uses in-memory computing to process data at tremendous speed and scale, especially for new data-centric workloads.

With this new round, C5 Capital Managing Partner Marcos Battisti joins Hazelcast's board of directors.

"Hazelcast is a true leader in a rapidly emerging new market dynamic," Battisti said. "With an incredibly impressive customer list and its advanced in-memory computing architecture, Hazelcast will continue to gain recognition as the world's largest organizations evolve their business applications to take advantage of the in-memory computing era."

With a strong customer base consisting of predominantly Global 2000 enterprises, Hazelcast's annual recurring revenue (ARR) has grown 300 percent in the past three years. Hazelcast customers include J.P. Morgan Chase, Charter Communications, Ellie Mae, UBS, National Australia Bank and many more.

Founded in 2012, Hazelcast launched its in-memory data grid (IMDG) product to directly address the inherent limitations of databases in use cases where microseconds count, including payment processing, microservices, fraud detection and many more. More recently, Hazelcast introduced two new products: Hazelcast Cloud, a managed service, and Hazelcast Jet, the industry's fastest event stream processing engine.

Additional Commentary

Bill Lehmann, principal at Bain Capital Ventures
"We see massive potential in Hazelcast's in-memory computing platform and are excited about the company's aggressive growth trajectory. Hazelcast is going after a multi-billion dollar opportunity, supported by the macro tailwinds of falling DRAM prices and the proliferation of data volume and sources. Many industry leaders in financial services, telco and tech already rely on Hazelcast's IMDG product to address their critical latency-sensitive use cases; we look forward to seeing accelerated adoption of Hazelcast's Jet and Cloud products."

Roland Manger, co-founder and partner at Earlybird Venture Capital
"The digital landscape has presented a number of challenges for enterprises and we are confident that Hazelcast is the answer to many of them, particularly those where time is of the utmost importance. We believe in-memory computing is just entering the mainstream and Hazelcast's superior speed at enormous scale place it ahead of the competition in providing the necessary solutions."

Venkatesh Seetharam, partner at Capital One Growth Ventures
"As enterprises move applications and workloads to the cloud, performance is becoming a key focus area to maintain and improve business service level agreements. Hazelcast has a proven history of delivering extremely fast performance for time-sensitive, cloud-native applications and we firmly believe the company has the right strategy and roadmap to support the world's most demanding companies."

About Hazelcast, Inc.

Hazelcast delivers the System of Now™, an in-memory computing platform that empowers Global 2000 enterprises to deliver innovative, low-latency, data-centric applications. Built for ultra-fast processing at extreme scale, Hazelcast's cloud-native in-memory data grid and event stream processing technologies are trusted by leading companies such as J.P. Morgan Chase, Charter Communications, Ellie Mae, UBS and National Australia Bank to accelerate business-critical applications.

Hazelcast is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with offices across the globe. To learn more about Hazelcast, visit https://hazelcast.com.