The introduction of Lambda Expressions, Optional, and Stream finally allowed Java to make the first big step into the Functional Programming world. A lot of hype and blogs was created around these new features but very soon they turn out to be very premature. So the Java 8 release created a huge demand for more Functional Programming features and libraries inspired by other languages and Vavr is one of the possible response. The original name of the library was Javaslang and it can be used even with older JDK versions.
Vavr's key points are lightness since it has no dependencies, API strongly inspired by Scala, and persistence collections interoperable with the Java collections API.