Upstash is a serverless data platform built for developers who deploy at the edge. Its flagship product is a Redis-compatible database that talks over HTTP instead of a persistent TCP connection, which makes it work inside serverless and edge runtimes where traditional Redis breaks. Around that core it has added QStash (a serverless message queue and scheduler), Upstash Vector (a serverless vector database), Search, and Workflow (durable serverless functions). Everything is priced per request with a guaranteed cap, so developers start free and pay only for what they use. Founded in 2020 by ex-Hazelcast engineers, Upstash powers Vercel KV under the hood and reached $1M ARR two years after its seed round.
Redis is the company behind the world's most popular in-memory data store, the open-source database that began as a side project by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009 and now sits in the stack of most of the internet's largest applications. It sells managed and self-hosted enterprise versions - Redis Cloud and Redis Software - layered on the open-source core, and has pushed hard into real-time AI use cases like vector search and LLM memory. After a turbulent 2024 licensing fight that spawned the AWS-backed Valkey fork, Redis returned to an open-source license (AGPLv3) with Redis 8 in 2025.