Building with Momento

When Khawaja Shams first reached out to tell me he was starting a company, I was beyond excited. I had the pleasure of first meeting Khawaja back in 2014, just after he brought NASA to the cloud (and Mars) and just before he joined AWS as VP of Engineering. At the time, I was working on bringing him into the Greylock network, and knew that I wanted to stay close and find ways to partner. 

The first company idea Khawaja pitched me was in the health and fitness space—an odd choice for a hardcore distributed systems guy. I did my best to be helpful (and subtly asked Khawaja why he wasn’t working on infrastructure), but frankly, the idea wasn’t for me. About a year later, Khawaja reached out again—he was pivoting to an idea much closer to his domain of expertise in large-scale distributed systems. He wanted to build an “intelligent serverless cache,” meaning an elastic, secure cache that’s capable of handling millions of transactions per second with a single API call. Khawaja’s experience at NASA and AWS gave him insight into what it would take to run very large systems that could scale and remain resilient to spikes in demand. At the time, I told him he would raise in a week. Khawaja told me I was crazy. Ten days later, he was fully funded. 

Over the past three years, Momento has quietly built a platform that provides reliable, turnkey infrastructure for real-time applications at any scale, creating a new category for interactive experiences. Khawaja, Momento’s co-founder Daniela Miao, and their team have developed an impressive suite of technologies that make building and operating in the cloud cost-effective and easy. Their tools for caching, storing data, and sending messages can handle large amounts of data quickly and reliably, ultimately helping developers work faster. As companies race to ship new AI features, it’s clear that a platform like this needs to exist. 

Since investing in Momento with both capital and sweat equity, we’ve worked closely with their team to identify an ideal customer profile (ICP) and connect with early customers. We’ve also helped power Momento’s GTM motion to broaden their customer outreach, iterate on product definition, and convert those conversations into paying customers. Most highly technical founders struggle with go-to-market, but from the beginning, this team has been customer-first and knows how to convert customer requirements into a product roadmap. Over the years, I’ve watched the Momento team take big bets while maintaining a customer-centric view of product development and it’s paid off. Today, Momento's global customer base includes CBS, Wyze, ProSieben, NTT DOCOMO, Paramount, and Taco Bell. 

Momento announced their $15M Series A today, along with the launch of a product that provides dependable low-latency messaging between any number of devices and servers. As they continue to help organizations ship faster than ever by simplifying real-time architecture at enterprise scale, we’re excited to keep building alongside this team in the years to come.