The last 2 years have been transformative for Lightbend.
We have continued pushing the envelope, empowering developers with everything they need to develop, operate, and secure highly transactional, always-available, ultra-low-latency cloud and edge applications .
I am excited to share our achievements from the last year and offer insights on what will come for the next many years with Lightbend.
In the past year, we have added more than 50 new blue chip customers from across the F2000, more than double the number of new customers added in any single year since our founding in 2011.
Our new customers are deploying Akka to achieve phenomenal scale. They include a leading enterprise SaaS vendor serving 65M users, one of the world’s largest retailers serving more than 200 million customers weekly, and one of the largest online travel sites handling $100B of travel bookings each year.
This has led to our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) increasing by 50%, our most significant growth since crossing over $10M in revenue eight years ago.
Additionally, our open source adoption increased substantially, with more than 500M annual downloads from 4M unique IP addresses, both records since the launch of Akka in 2009.
For the first time since our founding, we have turned operationally cash flow positive during the year. I’m particularly proud of this achievement, as Lightbend is now financially secure enough to look towards how we will serve our customers and employees for the next many years.
In May 2022, we shipped Kalix—the first step towards Lightbend becoming a cloud company. Kalix is the result of many years of hard work packaging up the value of Akka—its power in building low-latency, always-available, event-driven applications—into a simple high-level programming model delivered as a PaaS, removing most of the complexity developers have to navigate in cloud-native infrastructure.
Kalix exited 2023 as the CODiE and CloudX Awards Winner for Best PaaS. Numerous large enterprises and startups have committed to building and deploying over 1500 APIs generating 35M transactions/month on Kalix.
In 2023, we made three major releases of Akka that resolved 37 CVEs, added SOC2 compliance, and added features allowing cloud applications to be “stretched out” to the edge—including active-active replication, local storage, and brokerless messaging. These features have been released as Akka Edge, a unified runtime, data plane, and programming model that seamlessly bridges cloud and edge. Akka abstracts over the differences between cloud and edge, removing the duality’s complexity—liberating developers to focus on designing and developing services that run anywhere throughout the continuum.
We have expanded the executive team with four new stellar hires.
I’m excited to welcome the CFO (Daniel de Mos), CRO (Ken Hoffman), CMO (Darin Bartik), and CEO (Tyler Jewell) to the team. Tyler and I have worked closely on the board for the past 4 years, developing our vision and strategy. Lightbend is Tyler’s 4th foray as a CEO in DevEx, and he is well suited to helping us achieve our next phase of growth tied to our business.
I am excited to be our full-time CTO again, focusing on designing the next phase of our low-latency platform and developer experience around event-driven applications.
I am so proud of all these achievements. We have created a foundation for future growth and expansion. We are just getting started, and the upcoming years look bright. We have great plans for taking Akka and Kalix further, establishing Lightbend as the go-to cloud company for building ultra-low latency, highly performant, and resilient event-driven cloud and edge applications.
Lastly, I want to thank our amazing customers, community, investors, advisors, and employees for your trust, support, hard work, passion, and generosity over all these years. We would not be here without all of you, and I’m personally so grateful for the incredible and rewarding journey it has allowed me to be on for the last 13 years.
Thank you, everyone.
