How Aiven’s ‘open-source plumbing of the internet’ keeps the cloud in the sky

Over the past 20 years we’ve seen a rapid increase of tech companies reach cult status. Apple. Amazon. Tesla. Even in Australia, the likes of Atlassian and Canva are treated with reverence and their founders as mini-celebrities. It’s not often we wonder about the ‘in-between’ space. The critical infrastructure that companies need to function just isn’t as sexy.

Compared to the unicorns gracing business mastheads, Aiven largely works in the metaphorical shadows. Not real ones mind you — its Sydney CBD office is bathed in natural light and laughter.

Aiven is a company that combines open-source software with cloud infrastructure. And it’s a unicorn in its own right. Back in May, it raised US$210 million in Series D funding with a valuation of US$3 billion.

And back in September, it made its first acquisition —Kafkawize, an open-source data governance tool for Apache Kafka which has been renamed Klaw.

Aiven found a gap in the cloud

The company was founded in Helsinki in 2016 by Oskari Saarenmaa, Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen, and Mika Eloranta. All had more than 15 years of experience in the mission-critical data space working for Finnish companies like F-Secure and, before you ask, Nokia. 

The team identified a rise in Cloud adoption across businesses, but without the infrastructure solutions to properly support them. 

According to co-founder and CEO Oskari Saarenmaa, what was in the market was largely proprietary or difficult to implement. So the company turned to open source to democratise the space for its future clients.

“You can download them from Github. You can look at the code and how things are being built, but that doesn’t mean those technologies are accessible to everyone,” Saarenmaa said in an interview with SmartCompany.

“Running them and maintaining them is a lot of work. So we wanted to take care of this burden so that our customers could just focus on building their applications.”

Working in the background

Application users are even further removed from the process. Generally, we just want something to work and don’t need or care to know ‘how the sausage is made’ on the backend.

Saarenmaa uses food delivery apps as an example of the immense amount of background work and maintenance that goes into the likes of an Uber Eats order.

“You send a request and it has to go through a system and then processed by yet another system before it’s actually delivered to the restaurant. It then sees the order, prepares the meal and then signals the driver who’s going to bring it to you,” Saarenmaa explained.

The success of such a seemingly simple action on the surface all comes down to databases and streaming systems. But as your application or service grows, so do your databases and overall critical infrastructure needs for the business.

Saarenmaa unleashes a rapid-fire list of just some of the issues that can crop up.

“There can be security issues, patches to fix it, updates to roll out, new functionality, a cool new feature — but how do I access it? All sorts of maintenance is needed,” Saarenmaa said.

“Sometimes people could just do that themselves, but as we know there’s been a shortage of engineering talent all around the world.”

What’s particularly interesting about Aiven is that the products and services it offers almost rely on people not knowing they exist. Seamless, unnoticed integration is a mark of success.

“In infrastructure technology, you’re running the plumbing, most people don’t notice it’s there. But when it doesn’t work you have a lot of unhappy people.” Saarenmaa said.

“Aiven alone doesn’t provide a solution to the end users. Our growth relies on other application developers to be building something on top of us. We are very much about empowering people to build new things, and we want them to help them.”

“Our success is dependent on their success”

Aiven on the importance of identity… and crabs

One could argue that having a solid company identity is all the more important when you operate in the space between developers and end users. And Aiven has taken that very seriously. 

“The infrastructure space is not the sexiest topic in many people’s minds. We are holding onto production data so in that way it’s a very serious business,” Saarenmaa said.

“If you look at legacy data companies, they look a bit boring. We wanted to show we’re doing things. A fresh and new way of doing this.”

While spitballing ideas on how to convey this through a company logo, Aiven’s creative agency pitched, of all things, a cute crab. 

“I showed these to my three-year-old daughter and she was like that’s gonna be that one,” Saarenmaa laughed.

When asked whether there was some deeper meaning to the crab and why it was pitched, he said no.

“But we did kind of want to portray with Aiven a bit more playful way of looking at this world.”

Aiven is a Silver Sponsor of the 2022 Smart50 Awards, presenting the Rising Star Award category.