A “serverless cache” optimized for cloud computing
Momento allows customers to provision a secure cache, capable of handling millions of transactions per second, with a single API call.
Why we partnered
When Khawaja Shams first reached out to TheGP to tell us that he was starting a company, we were beyond excited. TheGP’s co-founder, Dan Portillo, originally met 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, Dan was trying to get him to join Greylock as an EIR (he was unsuccessful), but he remained hopeful that we would find a way to partner together down the line.
The first company idea Khawaja pitched Dan was in the health and fitness space—an odd choice for a hardcore distributed systems guy. Frankly, the idea wasn’t for us. 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 the insight to understand what it would take to run very large systems that could scale and remain resilient to spikes in demand. At the time, Dan told Khawaja that he would probably raise in a week. Khawaja said that was crazy. Ten days later, he was fully funded.
What we built together
Momento came out of stealth last fall with a platform that will meet the needs of some of the most demanding customers on the market today. Shams and his co-founder Daniela Miao, along with their team, have built a “serverless cache,” which is a highly available cache that delivers commonly used data to apps and databases faster. The platform lets developers add a cache to their cloud stack with around five lines of code, accelerating databases that run in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. Shams and Miao have also cultivated a great company culture that values both autonomy and inclusivity. They’ve taken big bets while maintaining a customer-centric view on product development, and this is only the beginning.
Since investing in Momento, we’ve worked closely with their team to identify an ideal customer profile (ICP) and connect with early customers. We’ve also combined our GTM operational resources to help Momento broaden customer outreach, iterate on product definition, and convert these 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. Momento just launched out of stealth, but they already have multiple six-figure contracts with global brands such as NTT Docomo, Paramount, and Wyze Labs.
