Ben Bromhead studied at the Australian National University. With his friend Adam Zegelin he first built relational.io, a product that came before Instaclustr. Peter Lilley and Doug Stuart joined them in the early venture.
While working on a proof of concept, Bromhead and Zegelin needed a database that could scale and stay available. They chose Apache Cassandra, which was hard to run, and found no one who would run it for them. In 2013 they founded Instaclustr in a shared innovation space on the ANU campus, with ANU Connect Ventures behind it from the start.
An A$2 million seed round followed in 2014. Funding continued in 2016 and 2018 as the company added managed Kafka, Spark, Redis and Elasticsearch. Bailador Technology Investments was another investor.
In 2020 Peter Lilley became CEO. In April 2022 NetApp announced it would acquire Instaclustr. That year the founders also received the ACT Chief Minister's Pearcey Entrepreneur Award.