Finnish unicorn Aiven sets up shop in Singapore

Helsinki-based Aiven, a software company that combines the best open-source technologies with cloud infrastructure, will expand its reach in the Asia-Pacific region by opening an office in Singapore.

This was announced following the fundraising of $60 million that extended Aiven’s initial $100-million Series C round. This brought the startup’s valuation to $2 billion.

The round was co-led by existing investors World Innovation Lab and IVP, and with the participation from Atomico and others.

The move to expand to a Southeast Asian market is influenced by the high momentum of digital transformation in the region. With more and more investments allocated to digitalisation and open source software, the economic growth potential and access to talent are strong, making Singapore a key market for Aiven. 

Aiven is also looking at locations like Indonesia and Malaysia for future expansion with Southeast Asia.

Aiven currently has more than 230 employees scaling global hubs from Helsinki, reaching Berlin, Boston, Toronto and Sydney. 

“This is an exciting step for Aiven on our journey and indicates that our team is successfully delivering on our mission to champion open source and make the lives of developers better in all that we do,” said Oskari Saarenmaa, CEO and co-founder at Aiven. 

“The additional funding from our existing investors will allow us to rapidly expand our global footprint, significantly contribute to the open source community and support the growth of other tech startups,” said Saarenmaa.

In an effort to give back to the open source community, Aiven continues its open source investment with its recently launched open source program office, solely focused on contributing to the projects that are key to Aiven’s customers. 

Additionally, Aiven will support promising entrepreneurs and launch its own startup program in December. The program participants will get access to Aiven’s expertise and data platform for free for one year.

With Aiven’s fully managed services for popular open source projects like Apache Kafka and Cassandra, OpenSearch, M3, PostgreSQL and more in the public cloud, businesses can enjoy a modern, fully-functional open source data infrastructure globally in minutes.