A quick look at the history of digital infrastructure would suggest that it is a sub-sector that investors should probably avoid given its unceasing change and complexity. Over the decades, as the industry began with mainframe computing, then moved to client servers, and then cloud, digital infrastructure has proved to be vexingly heterogeneous. No wonder the bulk of tech investment dollars flow to software applications, where entrenched winners are hard to dislodge. But Bain Capital is attracted to the dynamism of infrastructure and to the innovative energy of the entrepreneurs that populate this space. We are comfortable with the pace of change and, with the right partners, are succeeding at remaining at the forefront of it.
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Digital Infrastructure investments
We are trying to see where we can make investments that deliver innovative multi-cloud solutions to enterprises. We believe in developer friendly and cloud agnostic technologies. As a result, we look to back platforms which offer open, flexible, and data centric offerings that bring simplicity and compelling ROIs to customers regardless of their infrastructure choices
Powering the Future of IT
The data infrastructure market is characterized by constant change and complex, hybrid customer demand. Our approach to investing is to back innovators who see beyond the status quo dynamics and toward what infrastructure will be necessary in the coming technology cycle. This foresight requires unconventional thinking and sometimes investing in situations that most investors as too dynamic.
The driving force behind the world’s most-loved key value database
Bain Capital’s investment in Redis in 2013 was the first instance of us jumping into the creation of what we call the modern data stack. Redis is currently valued at roughly $2 billion – not an outcome that, ten years ago, most market observers would have predicted for an open-source company. But, Bain Capital has a history of thinking hard about where waves of disruption are likely to come from and investing behind them.
An emerging, differentiated leader in hyperconverged infrastructure
Nutanix, founded by Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron and Ajeet Singh in 2009, had built itself into a dominant player in the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market. Bain Capital, an admirer of its superior products, had been tracking the company for a long time, including as a publicly traded company with strong infrastructure technology tailwinds.
Partnering with an open source pioneer to accelerate its cloud journey
Relational database management systems represent the largest (and one of the most technical) infrastructure software markets in the world. As enterprises rapidly shift workloads from legacy closed-source providers to open source platforms, new winners are emerging. EDB, as the leader in the fast-growing Postgres open source ecosystem, is among them.
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