Snap snaps up database developer KeyDB to make its infrastructure more snappy

As Snapchat’s app continues to grow, the company is turning to the open source community to help further improve its technology infrastructure. This morning, Snap announced it’s acquiring Toronto-based KeyDB, the developer of an open source, high-performance database, for an undisclosed sum.

The startup’s six-person team, including its co-founders John Sully and Ben Schermel, will join Snap’s infrastructure team following the deal’s close, and will work to improve Snap’s caching technology and its sizable engineering workloads, the company says.

A Y Combinator-backed startup, KeyDB touted its solution as being a faster alternative to Redis, offering a focus on things like multithreading, memory efficiency and high throughput. For Snap, it sees the advantage in bringing the technology — and the team’s expertise — in-house to help the company reduce its operational costs across teams and to free up engineering bandwidth. This also allows Snap to focus more on building out other core Snapchat experiences, the company said.

A Snap spokesperson told TechCrunch that KeyDB’s technology will be of significant use across all of Snap, including its monetization and Spotlight platforms. The latter is Snapchat’s short-form video product and a rival to TikTok, which is now a key part of Snap’s business.

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