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The Road to Inkless: Reinventing Kafka for the AI Era
The Road to Inkless: Reinventing Kafka for the AI Era
Inkless Kafka is now generally available. While our technical blog dives into the "what" and the "how" of the product…
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänAiven started with a simple idea: making data infrastructure simple. We accomplished that. But the world has moved on. We’ve entered a paradigm shift where AI agents and coding assistants have moved from "adaptation" to "revolution." The constraints of the last decade: time, specialized skill, and high infrastructure cost are being wiped away. The question is no longer "How do I manage my databases?" It’s "How fast can I build?" Our mission has evolved because the market has. We are no longer just a data infrastructure platform. Our mission is to be the best platform to build production applications and AI agents, the place where your code is written and ran, where we handle everything beneath it. We’ve updated our brand to reflect this reality. It’s cleaner, faster, and built for the next decade of development. Our new mission is simple: Stop Managing. Start Building. Check out the new Aiven: aiven.io
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänCrab Week 2026, our fifth annual company offsite, is different. Most such offsites are about trying to paint a view of the vision and strategy. This time the "what" is settled and the only thing left to talk about is how to further increase the velocity. In the last year, we've shifted Aiven from a database platform to a data and application cloud. We didn't do this to follow a trend; we did it because the engineering reality changed. A few things that are top of mind at Šibenik: 1. Andrej Karpathy noted that coding agents basically didn't work before December 2025. Now they do. This isn't an incremental change; it's a reset for how our customers build and how we provide infrastructure. 2. We aren't interested in just porting old products to new interfaces. We are building the substrate for agentic applications that were literally impossible to build two years ago. 3. I'm back to writing code because it keeps me honest about what we’re building. Our goal isn't 2x or 3x productivity. We are setting a new standard for what 10x looks like when you combine the best tools with production data and amazing talent. Aiven started with four developers who wanted to make other developers' lives better. Ten years later, the tech has flipped upside down, but that's still the only reason we're here. Now we move from vision to velocity. 🦀
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Oskari Saarenmaa julkaisi tämänHeaded to San Francisco for the week ✈️ We are building incredible technology in Europe right now. Here in Helsinki and obviously next door in Stockholm. But we can’t ignore the fact that the Bay Area remains the world’s highest concentration of AI talent and innovation. At Aiven we’re moving fast to provide the AI infrastructure for the next generation of developers. To do that right, you have to go where the density is. We haven't had a direct flight from Helsinki to SF since 2020. Our national airlines seem more focused on holiday traffic to Thailand than connecting the Nordics to the talent capital of the AI revolution. Short-term revenue is fine, but better connectivity to the Bay Area would drive GDP-level impact for the Finnish tech ecosystem. Turkka Kuusisto something to consider?
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänEurope doesn’t have a cloud capacity problem. It has a "thinking big" problem. I was reading Helsingin Sanomat today and noticed a claim that caught my eye. It suggested Finland is moving election data to AWS because there are "hardly any players in Finland or even Europe" capable of storing such data in the cloud. With all due respect, that is simply not true. It is a myth that European companies lack the capability to handle critical national workloads. While we don’t have a hyperscaler the size of AWS yet, let’s be realistic. We are talking about election data for a country of 5 million people. This is not a technical scaling issue. It is a sovereignty and choice issue. At Aiven, we have spent 10 years running complex, massive-scale data workloads for global companies on heterogeneous infrastructure. We see the demand for a truly Sovereign European Cloud reaching a tipping point right now. The goal is to have this system ready for the 2027 elections. That is plenty of time. We do not need years of ambitious plans to build data centers from scratch. We need to use the sophisticated cloud software platforms that already exist here in Europe. It is time to stop defaulting to "there are no other options." The options are here. We just need the collective will to use them. https://lnkd.in/dstNpySwVaalitiedot | Supon päällikkö: Kannattaisi vielä harkita vaalitietojen siirtämistä Amazonin pilveenVaalitiedot | Supon päällikkö: Kannattaisi vielä harkita vaalitietojen siirtämistä Amazonin pilveen
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänInkless Kafka is now generally available. This is huge, not only for Kafka, but also for Aiven. The team's written about all the technical wins in separate articles, but I wanted to talk about how and why we created Inkless in the first place, and about the transformation at Aiven that enabled it.The Road to Inkless: Reinventing Kafka for the AI EraThe Road to Inkless: Reinventing Kafka for the AI Era
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänContext is the missing piece of the AI puzzle. Yesterday, we hosted the "Context is King" meetup at our Helsinki HQ. It was completely oversubscribed: 250+ signups and people traveling internationally just to join. The interest confirms what we’ve been betting on: while LLMs are powerful, the real bottleneck for production AI is context. As Ville noted: context and governance are currently scattered. There is no one-size-fits-all solution yet, and value in the next few years will be built by whoever manages this layer correctly. At Aiven, we are building the AI infrastructure stack for future developers. Our approach follows a clear evolution: 👑 We started with the Infrastructure Layer: Building a data fabric that is elastic by default. We are still pushing this forward, finalizing some massive Kafka architectural shifts that will redefine how data streams in the cloud. 👑 Now, we’re bringing in the Context Layer: This is the product layer that connects your proprietary, governed data to AI applications. By solving for both, we allow far more powerful applications and agents to be created on top. This is the stack that moves AI from a demo phase into production, enabling existing production data (that the business relies on) with AI workloads. Context remains King 👑 Yesterday's Helsinki meetup was just the start. Based on the traction, we are planning to run more editions of "Context is King". We want to bring together the builders who are moving from demos to production. If you care deeply about how the context layer should work for data-intensive problems, reach out to Stanislav. He and the team are building something that I believe will fundamentally change the developer experience for AI. We’re hiring across the board to build this stack. If you’re a builder who wants to lead, join us. 🦀 https://aiven.io/careers
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänStill doubting Europe? Go to HEL. That Slush banner at the entrance was the most confident statement of the week. This November week is the highlight of the year when thousands of people, full of confidence, come to Helsinki. At Aiven we had the privilege of hosting an AI open source infrastructure side event, organized brilliantly by our own Kaisu, who brought the same dedication to it that she demonstrated as a Slush team member last year. We hosted two panels: first one with Rebecka, Heikki, and Oded diving into the evolving landscape of AI data infrastructure, and following that Emma, Trygve, and Shiven explored what it really takes to build production-ready agents. I myself had the honor to be back on stage at the main event to discuss "how to build products that don't become someone else's features" with Eric Liaw and Shiven Ramji. The topic of our talk made me think about what product vs. feature means for Slush itself. The world focuses on the $4 trillion of venture capital in the building: the spectacle, the stage, the deals. That is the feature everyone pays attention to. The product is the team of students and recent-grads along with 1700 volunteers running this entire non-profit event flawlessly, dedicating their time and energy for a mission. This generates the unique energy that the $4T is actually buying into. This focus and dedication is the true engine for growth in Europe. THANK YOU Aino, Elin and everyone who made Slush 2025 come to life.
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Oskari Saarenmaa jakoi tämänI'm looking for a VP of Platform Engineering to join us at Aiven. Our HQ in Helsinki is one of the hubs you can choose. Thinking about coming to Finland? Don't get stuck on the two common myths: weather and taxes. 1️⃣ Taxes: For key international talent, it’s a flat 25% tax rate for your first 7 years. That's often lower than where you are now. 2️⃣ Weather: Yes, it gets dark some of the year. But we're spared the extreme heatwaves and storms. Our seasons are stable, and the summers are incredible. What you get in return is the world's happiest country ✅ A society built on trust ✅ A place so safe kids walk to school on their own. If you're ready to build world-class platforms in a place that just works, check out the role here: https://lnkd.in/ePpGei_h P.S. The photo? A view of the Natural History Museum from my office window this November morning, advertising their “Forest Home” exhibition. Here you can live in the forest, close to the city, or in the city, close to the forest.
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Oskari Saarenmaa julkaisi tämän uudelleenOskari Saarenmaa julkaisi tämän uudelleenHelsinki is dark and rainy, but the Slush office is more lit than ever 🔥 We have less than 100 Investor Passes left for Slush 2025. Get yours now at slush.org/tickets or suffer with the biggest FOMO of the year. PS. Guess which floor is ours?
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A direct flight to SF would benefit the tech ecosystem which over the long term would result in more travelers on that route, on full fare tickets. Stockholm also doesn't have a direct SF flight IIUC, I bet there are more than a couple Swedes who'd appreciate this connection. Or hey, maybe Finnair could fly from Arlanda to SF. I'd take that over the current options.
But I don't pretend to know the details here. They fly to Chicago and Seattle but not SF, must be a reason why this route never came back post covid. Maybe it's lack of connecting flights or fit for the current fleet. Finnair's US flights' business and premium economy seem to be always full while the back of the plane is empty.
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäI am happy to announce our 3.5 million EUR oversubscribed Seed funding round. Severi Tikkala, Esko Vähämäki and I founded ConfidentialMind with the premise that we can do world-class infrastructure software in Europe. And that in order to be competitive, Europe needs to own its AI middleware. Our technology enables companies and nation states to run their own AI and AI agent systems without exposing their sensitive data to third parties. None of this would be possible without our team and the customers who trust us. We are now active in projects around the globe, working with partners who extend our reach and share the same journey. In addition to our existing investors, this round we are joined by D11Z. Ventures which is the family office of Dieter Schwarz and Lifeline Ventures a leading Finnish venture capital fund. Thanks also to the Finnish public broadcasting company Yle for covering our funding round. Link to the story in the comments. Severi Tikkala, Esko Vähämäki, Henri Dahl, Matias Pöllänen, Petteri Koponen, Edward Kim, Nico Roos, Dan Kozytskyi, Sakari Tanskanen, Lucas Björklund, Antti Sirkiä. Julian Faber, Patrick Krönlein, Petteri Koponen, Jesse Heikkila, Hannu Jungman, Daniel Fried, Joel-Oskar Raisanen, Jonathan Scudder, Turo Numminen, ilkka Hiidenheimo, Markus Oksanen.
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäSome news from Sebastian Haas and me: Talon.One has signed an agreement to be acquired by Adyen. We couldn’t be more proud of the 300 people behind Talon.One who built this. You wrote the code, you shipped the product, and showed up for our customers every day to make a product people actually want to use. We just focused on two things: let’s build a great business and a world-class product. Turns out that’s enough. Now we get to do it on a bigger stage. At the heart of this partnership with Adyen is a deep belief in the transformative value of loyalty. By joining Adyen, we are moving towards a future of Unified Commerce, where loyalty and payments are no longer separate silos. This combination will allow us to accelerate innovation and use the combined forces to better serve our customers. Thank you team! Let’s go! More to come in the weeks ahead. Read the news here: https://lnkd.in/dmvFG9BNTalon.One joins forces with Adyen: Read more here | Talon.OneTalon.One joins forces with Adyen: Read more here | Talon.One
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäWe've raised a $4.5M seed round led by Frontline Ventures, with HubSpot Ventures, Lifeline Ventures and incredible angels joining. Three years ago, we founded Realm because we saw that context would become the foundation of agents powering our work. On our journey, revenue teams became our most active users. The product resonated with them in a way that was hard to ignore. They described how Realm helps them focus on the human side of their work, instead of RFPs, questionnaires, and status updates that fill the time in between. We've been building for them ever since. Walk into any engineering team today and you'll see terminal windows running in parallel. Agents are doing the work while humans are piloting the direction. We believe revenue work will undergo a similar revolution. We're seeing early signs of it, but it's unevenly distributed. Three things have held this back. Revenue teams don't have a codebase. Their context is fragmented across tools and unstructured data. Critical information, such as why a deal was won, has to be pieced together from subtle, scattered signals. Realm's context graph solves this. Second, these agents need to be inherently multiplayer. Easy to share, collaborate, and use across your organization. Third, this institutional context and agents should be easy to use wherever you work: Realm, Claude, Slack, and more. Our goal is to make this mainstream in customer-facing teams, starting with enterprise sales. If you want to try out Realm, we've just launched a self-serve trial. If you want to go a step further and join us, we're hiring across GTM and engineering.
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäI’ve just spent an incredible two days in Croatia with Finnish tech company Aiven for their annual conference. From a tech start up 11 years ago, it has grown to be a leading provider in managed open-source data infrastructure behind some of the apps and online services we use every week. This event was about setting the direction and speed of travel for the future, and I was invited to deliver my keynote ‘Altitude & Attitude - why mindset matters’. It’s always great when my story and message generate deeper questions and conversations and thanks to the fantastic hospitality, I was able to continue engaging with their brilliant international team beyond the stage. I loved the vibe, I loved the conversations. Thank you again for inviting me and for the incredibly warm welcome. This photo with event MCs Steph & Caio certainly captures the mood of Crab Week 2026. Steph made their outfits (seriously impressive) and I was intrigued to discover that Caio is not only a Welsh name, but also a popular Brazilian name too. It was great to meet you. Kaisa Sosala Tom Burns Helen Teppo Juulia Orimus Maiju Wickström Oskari Saarenmaa Ed Ross Kenneth Chen Samuel Tervaskanto Kyle Kearns Noaman Ali Ville Lehto Caio B. Stephanie Rubin Olivia Bodle Elizabeth W. Chartwell Speakers
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäHad a great time at Aiven's Crab Week yesterday, sharing the stage with CEO Oskari Saarenmaa. Wolt and Aiven started working together back in 2019, just before our hypergrowth phase, bringing us world-class Kafka expertise. We talked about the journey from the early days, when both companies were much smaller, to where we are today, and how we’ve really grown together along the way. One thing that stood out: trust isn’t built when everything is working perfectly. It’s built in those tough moments, when things break and people come together to fix them.
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäOskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäA morning of live demos, customers on stage and product launches that accelerate software. At our offsite in Croatia 🇭🇷 this week, we kicked off around the notion that software wants to go faster. Data, AI Agents and Application infrastructure need to move at the same pace and this is what we are shipping at Aiven. We are building a culture where speed is not the outcome, but the input. Tackling the hard conversations, dealing with the real problems openly and never losing sight of our North Star - The apps and AI agents that matter are the ones built on open source production data that need scale. Day 1 ✅ More to come 📈 🦀 🚀
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Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäSince the first day I joined Aiven, my work has been focused on enabling our Vision of building the AI-Ready data infrastructure. You might ask yourself, what's AI-ready? Well.. there are multiple things you have to keep in mind, but what I'm personally obsessed with is building the context. Context for how agents should do a certain task and why - the reasoning engine behind the agentic actions. Today, I'm excited to Announce the Release of Aiven for DataHub in Limited Availability! Amazing work team! 🚀 DataHub acts as a centralized context layer across your data systems on Aiven and beyond. It allows you to search across your data assets in different systems, document them, define access, and see lineage of how data flows. With the support of DataHub's MCP server agents can do the same, use the data catalog as a reasoning layer to explore and plan their work before building on top of data. If you are on a path of making your data AI-ready - let's talk! We're currently onboarding early customers to Aiven for DataHub, learn more at aiven.io/datahub or send me a DM. Massive shoutout to all the Aiveners who made this happen, including Joonas Longi Samuli Suortti Christian Funkhouser Valtteri Juvonen Martin Rios Ayesha Ahmad Ioan Natanga Stacey Salamon Audrey B. 👨⚕️Guillaume Winter Tom Burns 🦡 Joey Coleman Francesco Tisiot Dimitri Casvigny Cassio Sampaio Oskari Saarenmaa and sooo many others! Proud day to be a crab! 🦀Oskari Saarenmaa tykkäsi tästäWe're launching Aiven for DataHub on Limited Availability today and it's worth the wait. When AI agents are expected to navigate complex data environments and deliver accurate results, they need context. Right now, most systems don't give them that. Disconnected tools, missing metadata, no single source of truth - it creates a gap that slows down both humans and AI alike. Aiven for DataHub is our answer to that problem. A managed, open source data catalogue that gives both humans and AI agents the context they need to find, understand, and trust data. Read Stanislav Dmitriev's blog, who has been leading this work, for all the information: https://lnkd.in/e7RYRCtH #DataEngineering #AI #OpenSource #Aiven #DataHub
