Before Instaclustr there was relational.io, and almost nobody remembers it.
Ben Bromhead and Adam Zegelin were students at the Australian National University in Canberra, friends who liked building things together. With two older colleagues, Peter Lilley and Doug Stuart, they started a product called relational.io. It was the sort of early venture many founders quietly bury. Bromhead, though, mentions it on his own company profile, a small clue that the company everyone knows came out of an earlier attempt, not a flash of genius.
The team was bootstrapped at the start, with Lilley and Stuart in the early cheques-and-spreadsheets role, while the two engineers built the platform.
The real turn came in a plain engineering moment. Zegelin has described how the two were working on a proof-of-concept that needed a database which could scale, stay available, and handle flexible data shapes. Their research led them to Apache Cassandra. It was powerful and also famously hard to run. When they looked for someone who would run it for them, there was nobody. The gap was the business.
So in 2013 they set up Instaclustr in a shared innovation space on the ANU campus, with the university's venture arm, ANU Connect Ventures, behind it from the first day. Canberra is not Silicon Valley, and they did not pretend otherwise. At one point 20 of 25 staff worked from the capital. The team was bootstrapped at the start, with Lilley and Stuart in the early cheques-and-spreadsheets role, while the two engineers built the platform.
Money arrived in steps. A A$2m seed in 2014. A US$7m Series A in 2016. A US$15m round in 2018 as customers wanted Kafka, Spark, Redis and Elasticsearch managed too. Total funding stayed modest, about US$22m, which forced the company to earn its way.
The pressure was always the giants. Amazon and others offered their own managed databases. Instaclustr's answer, as it said in 2022, was to stay purely open source rather than lock customers in.
In 2020 Lilley moved up from COO to CEO. In April 2022 NetApp announced it would buy the company; the price was never published, though local reports put it above A$500m. That same year Bromhead and Zegelin received the ACT Chief Minister's Pearcey Entrepreneur Award.
For first-time founders the quiet lesson sits in the order of events. The winning idea did not arrive first. It arrived because a failed or forgotten project forced two friends to solve a problem for themselves, and then notice others had it too.