Gear6

About Gear6

Gear6, established in 2006 in Mountain View, California, operated as a provider of enterprise-grade storage management solutions. The company identified a critical market need for scaling high-traffic websites and applications, focusing its efforts on the open-source Memcached technology. Many of the web's most popular destinations, including Facebook and Twitter, utilized Memcached to manage performance and scale to millions of users, but required significant in-house expertise to maintain.

Gear6's core business was providing a commercial distribution of Memcached, packaged as the Gear6 Web Cache. This offering was designed for enterprise clients who needed the performance benefits of in-memory caching without dedicating their own engineering teams to customize and manage the open-source software. The solution aimed to accelerate I/O transactions within data centers, thereby improving server utilization and the performance of application workloads. Key features included overcoming the 1MB object size limit of standard Memcached, offering more granular memory allocation, and providing high-availability clustering options to prevent service interruptions and data loss. The company generated revenue by selling this enhanced, protocol-compliant Memcached solution.

The company successfully secured a total of $28.5 million in funding over three rounds, with its first known round occurring in March 2008. Notable institutional investors included USVP, InterWest Partners, and Western Technology Investment. The largest single round was a Series B for $10 million in March 2008. Ultimately, Gear6 was classified as an "acqui-hired" company, indicating its journey concluded with an acquisition valued primarily for its talent and technology.