Ofer Bengal had a business plan for a toy company. He had already been an aerospace engineer, worked on aircraft modifications, and set up a consultancy. Inventing toys offered a different kind of problem to solve. Now he wanted to manufacture them. He needed an investor.
One of the Zisapel brothers, figures in Israel’s technology industry, offered an unusually economical screening process: let his children try the toys. The children approved. “That’s the due diligence,” Bengal recalled. The money appeared to be within reach.
Then the proposal changed. Why make toys when they could start a data communications company together? The investor would supply the capital; Bengal would run it. Bengal said no. His mind was on toys. When other investors proved elusive, he reconsidered.
It is a useful opening to the life of a database entrepreneur. The career that eventually brought Bengal to Redis began with a customer test conducted by children, followed by an offer to enter an entirely different market.
“That’s the due diligence.”Ofer Bengal, on an investor’s children testing his toys
A toy pitch with unexpected terms
Bengal’s training was in aerospace engineering at the Technion, where he earned his bachelor’s degree with honors. His work took him through the Israeli Air Force and into his own engineering consultancy. The inventor’s thread continued alongside the company builder’s: his official biography credits him with 17 US and international patents, and toy concepts licensed to Milton Bradley, Hasbro, and Tomy.
Those names belong to a rather different shelf from enterprise databases. Yet they help explain why the neat occupational label “software founder” leaves so much out. Bengal had experience making things long before he was selling data infrastructure. His working life had already crossed from engineering assignments into independent business.
At RiT Technologies, he spent roughly a decade as founder and chief executive, supplying communications systems. He took the company public on Nasdaq in 1997. By the time he began Redis, he had already lived through the change from starting a company to answering for an established one.
Early to the mobile internet
Experience did not exempt him from timing. In 2000, Bengal left RiT to pursue mobile internet through a business called Mobile Economy. The idea sounds ordinary from the far side of the smartphone. At the time, the iPhone was still years away.
His later account was plain: the company built technology used by European mobile operators, but struggled to generate revenue because end users were not yet using mobile internet in sufficient numbers. In 2003, he sold it to a partner, returning some money to investors. He described the outcome as his first experience of failure.
The story has an awkward lesson for anyone collecting tidy rules about entrepreneurship. Moving toward a growing technology does not guarantee that customers will arrive on your schedule. Bengal had recognized a direction the world would eventually take. The commercial calendar was less cooperative.
Board work followed. One of the companies was Crescendo Networks, founded by Yiftach Shoolman. Bengal and Shoolman became friends and discussed doing something together. Their future partnership developed before there was a Redis company to put it in.
The software inside the first plan
They founded their business in 2011 as Garantia Data. Their initial interest was speeding up applications. Redis, created by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009, entered the picture as something useful inside the product they were building.
As developers embraced Redis, Bengal and Shoolman reconsidered what they should be selling. The supporting technology looked increasingly like the main opportunity. They changed direction. The business became Redis Labs, and eventually Redis.
There are two beginnings here, and keeping them separate gives each participant his due. Sanfilippo created the software project. Bengal and Shoolman founded the company that built a commercial business around it. A familiar product name can make those histories look deceptively interchangeable.
The co-founders’ decision also complicates the usual advice to stick to the plan. Their first product brought them close enough to notice a different opportunity. Following it required giving up work they had already chosen. Bengal’s toy company had changed industries; this company changed its center of gravity.
Sanfilippo joined Redis Labs in 2015. When he stepped back from day-to-day maintenance in 2020, Bengal and Shoolman published a joint appreciation. They credited the simplicity of his software design and described a transition involving Yossi Gottlieb, Oran Agra, and a core team of contributors. Their company’s future depended on work that had begun outside it, and on people who could carry that work forward.
A business built around waiting less
Bengal’s explanation of the market was grounded in what people experience when an application responds. In a 2017 interview with Shoolman, he discussed highly interactive applications that needed quick responses under changing conditions. Counting, scoring, lists, and sets were practical building blocks. Performance mattered because somebody was waiting.
The enterprise business added another set of requirements. A developer might adopt a useful tool quickly. A large organization also needed availability, operational stability, scaling, and support. Bengal and Shoolman described the work of making Redis suitable for those demands, including running it as a managed service.
That combination gave the company a commercial task beyond spreading the software’s name. It had to persuade customers that operating the technology reliably was worth paying for. The conversation moved from whether developers liked Redis to what a business needed when Redis became part of its daily operations.
By July 2018, Bengal reported about 8,500 paying customers and a team of roughly 200, divided between Israel and Mountain View. Those are historical figures, but they capture a particular stage: the company was already serving many customers while still building its organization.
He could also puncture an interview’s executive solemnity. Asked about dinner with other CEOs, he said he preferred “other people, not CEOs.” The answer has the appeal of a small window opening in a room full of business metrics.
Across the table from the cloud
For a company offering database services, the public cloud presented a peculiar relationship problem. The same large providers could supply infrastructure, offer access to customers, and sell competing services. Bengal had to do business across that overlap.
In 2019, Bengal appeared with Google Cloud chief executive Thomas Kurian as the companies expanded their partnership. Redis Enterprise Cloud subsequently became available through Google Cloud Marketplace, with unified billing and a route for customers to use existing Google Cloud spending commitments. The arrangement addressed purchasing as well as technology. A customer’s finance department had a part in the database story.
In 2020, Bengal introduced Microsoft’s Julia Liuson during the announcement of an expanded relationship bringing Redis Enterprise capabilities to Azure Cache for Redis. Those partnerships offered customers a way to buy and run the product through familiar platforms. They also placed the business within the cloud providers’ distribution systems.
supplierSales
channelProduct
competitor
A diagram of the commercial relationship, not a measure of revenue.
Licensing addressed another side of the problem. In 2018, Redis changed the terms for certain modules while keeping the core project under BSD. A further modules-license revision followed in 2019. The company argued that cloud providers could commercialize others’ development work without contributing proportionately to it.
The disagreement continued after Bengal’s CEO tenure. Redis changed the core software’s licensing in 2024. In May 2025, under Rowan Trollope, it added the open-source AGPLv3 option with Redis 8. Trollope acknowledged that the previous change had damaged the company’s relationship with its community. This history resists a clean victory lap: commercial protection and developer trust both needed attention.
The next person in the chair
The business reached another financial milestone in April 2021, raising $110 million in a round led by Tiger Global that valued Redis Labs above $2 billion. That summer, the company dropped “Labs” from its name. Bengal and Shoolman presented the shorter name as a reflection of the company’s maturity and its commitment to Redis.
A valuation is a snapshot of a financing transaction. The harder organizational question is what happens next. On February 1, 2023, Trollope succeeded Bengal as chief executive, and Bengal became chairman. Redis described the succession as long planned.
Bengal welcomed his successor’s mix of public-company experience, enterprise knowledge, and developer background. He described his own continuing attachment to Redis in parental terms. The founder’s relationship with the company would continue; responsibility for running it would pass to someone else.
His advice to other founders puts people near the center. In an investor interview, he put it plainly: “people are your most valuable asset.” He also emphasized persistence. Coming from a career containing both long commitments and abandoned plans, that advice allows for a useful distinction: persistence takes work, and choosing where to apply it takes judgment.
Another beginning in data
Bengal’s public professional profile now includes RiverPool. Its website describes a business founded by people who spent more than a decade building Redis, this time working on analytics and data warehouses. As of October 2026, it is inviting early-access registrations.
The stated goal is to automate the workflow from bringing source-system data into an organization to delivering business measures. Those are the company’s ambitions for its product. They put Bengal near another familiar difficulty: useful information can demand too much work before somebody can act on it.
The toy manufacturing plan never supplied the tidy ending its author might once have expected. Instead, Bengal accumulated companies, collaborators, a public offering, and a chairmanship. The interesting continuity is his willingness to take the next problem seriously, even when it arrived wearing the wrong business plan.