# Alexander Gallego

> Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Redpanda Data
- **Organizations:** Redpanda Data, Concord Systems (Acquired by Akamai), Akamai Technologies, YieldMo, FactSet Research Systems
- **From:** Manizales, Colombia
- **Nationality:** Colombian-American
- **Education:** Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, NYU School of Engineering (Polytechnic)
- **Known for:** Built Redpanda Data from zero to $1B unicorn valuation in under 6 years, Raised $265.5M total across Seed, Series A, B, C, and D rounds, Achieved 300% revenue growth in 2024 and 179% customer base expansion

## Career timeline

- **~2009** — Internship as Programming Services Specialist at Forex Capital Markets
- **2011-2012** — Software Engineer at FactSet Research Systems, processing S&P 500 data in C++
- **2012** — Joined YieldMo as first engineer, built initial advertising SDK and ad server
- **2014** — Co-founded Concord Systems (Concord.io), a high-performance C++ stream-processing engine
- **2016** — Concord Systems acquired by Akamai Technologies
- **2016-2019** — Principal Software Engineer at Akamai; built storage engine outperforming Kafka by 34x
- **2019** — Founded Redpanda Data (then Vectorized) in San Francisco
- **2020** — Open-sourced Redpanda under BSL source-available license; closed Seed round
- **2021** — Raised Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Jepsen report validated data integrity
- **2022** — Raised $50M Series B led by GV; acquired CloudHut/Kowl
- **2023** — Raised $100M Series C led by Lightspeed
- **2024** — 300% revenue growth; 179% customer base expansion
- **2025-04** — Raised $100M Series D led by GV; achieved $1B unicorn valuation; launched Agentic AI Platform

## Achievements

- Built Redpanda Data from zero to $1B unicorn valuation in under 6 years
- Raised $265.5M total across Seed, Series A, B, C, and D rounds
- Achieved 300% revenue growth in 2024 and 179% customer base expansion
- Delivered Kafka-compatible streaming platform with 34x performance improvements
- Passed Jepsen correctness test — one of the most rigorous data integrity validations in distributed systems
- Scaled Redpanda to handle 14GB/second sustained throughput
- Created 'Hack The Planet' scholarship providing mentorship and funding for underrepresented engineers
- Co-founded Concord Systems, acquired by Akamai in 2016
- Published research papers in ACM and cryptography journals while at NYU
- Received Google and NSF grants for security game theory research at NYU
- Launched Agentic AI Platform and MCP integration for real-time enterprise AI in 2025

## Latest updates

- **2025-04** — Redpanda raised $100M Series D led by GV at $1B valuation; launched enterprise Agentic AI Platform with MCP integration and 300+ connectors.
- **2025-04** — Announced partnership integration with TigerBeetleDB for high-performance transactional systems.
- **2024-12** — Reported 300% revenue growth and 179% customer base expansion for the year.
- **2024-08** — Posted benchmark achieving 500 microseconds latency in a production Redpanda cluster.
- **2024-09** — Published 'Redpanda One: a beginning' outlining vision for unified data platform.

## Links

- Website: https://redpanda.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandergallego
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/emaxerrno
- GitHub: https://github.com/emaxerrno

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/alexander-gallego
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-27