Redis announces CEO transition, appoints Rowan Trollope to replace Ofer Bengal

Israeli database software developer Redis announced on Monday the appointment of Rowan Trollope as the company’s Chief Executive Officer, replacing Ofer Bengal, who will become Chairman of the Board. The company said the transition is part of a long-planned succession process and will be effective February 1, 2023.

Trollope joins Redis from Five9, where he served as CEO for over four years. Bengal co-founded Redis in 2011 with Yiftach Shoolman and has served as its CEO since its inception.

Rowan Trollope.

“I’d like to welcome Rowan to Redis. I’m excited by his vision to take the company to its next growth stage,” said Ofer Bengal. “Rowan has the ideal combination of successfully leading a public company, long-time experience of driving value for enterprise customers, and developer origins. His comprehensive business experience and proven track record delivering cloud technologies are invaluable for Redis and will amplify and strengthen its position in the database management systems market.”

Redis was mulling over going public this year before the downturn in the market. The company was valued at $2 billion when it completed a $110 million Series G round in April of 2021 and was reportedly targeting to more than double that valuation in the IPO.

Tiger Global led the Series G, which also included participation of another new investor in Softbank’s Vision Fund 2, as well as from existing investor TCV. Additionally, Tiger, SoftBank, and TCV acquired shares as part of a $200 million secondary transaction. Redis raised $100 million eight months earlier in August 2020 at a valuation of $1 billion.

Before Five9, Trollope was SVP and General Manager of Cisco's Applications Group and an executive leadership team member. Prior to Cisco, at Symantec, he was Group President of sales, marketing, and product development, responsible for cloud security and the SMB market.

“People are fed up with slow and unresponsive apps and businesses realize they need to redesign their products or else lose their customers. At the same time AI is revolutionizing how software is built and is being embedded in virtually every app,” stated Trollope. “In response, entrepreneurs have been hard at work inventing the next generation tech stack, from AI tool-chains to front-end frameworks to the database layer, to make it easy for developers to build fast, scalable apps with AI at the core. I’m excited to join Redis because Ofer, Yiftach, and their team alongside the incredible open-source community, have been creating an insanely great platform that is loved by developers like me. Redis is well positioned to continue disrupting the database market and taking data layer performance to the next level.”