As we speak, we’re excited to announce that we have now agreed to amass Neona developer-first, serverless Postgres firm. Neon’s co-founders are among the many only a few folks on the earth who may re-architect Postgres with true separation of storage and compute, constructed for contemporary builders and AI techniques. Their world-class crew of Postgres hackers and database veterans will be part of Databricks to ship serverless Postgres at manufacturing scale to builders in an AI-native world.
A developer-first mission, born from Postgres experience
4 years in the past, the Neon co-founders joined along with a imaginative and prescient to disrupt the database business. They noticed that the foundations of database applied sciences have been largely designed for the 90s period. Their aim was to construct a brand new database platform that may dramatically enhance experiences for builders, in some basic methods:
They foresaw that Postgres would turn into the de facto normal for databases and had the imaginative and prescient to create a serverless Postgres platform.
They have been decided to make it potential to create a brand new Postgres occasion in seconds, so builders wouldn’t want to attend.
They got down to simplify the operational side of database scaling by automating it as load modified, so builders may begin very small and never fear about over- or under-provisioning.
They wished to allow speedy experimentation and testing by supporting prompt forking and branching of databases and creating totally remoted databases, as databases are sometimes one of the tough modules to check in end-to-end software testing.
A couple of years in, the Neon crew engineered a brand new, modern database structure that decouples storage scaling from compute scaling, which finally enabled the entire above targets. When Neon first launched, builders raved concerning the pace, the simplicity, and the power to department and fork their databases like Git does for code.
The shift towards AI brokers
As Neon turned GA final 12 months, they observed an fascinating stat: 30% of the databases have been created by AI brokers, not people. After they checked out their stats once more just lately, the quantity went from 30% to over 80%. That’s, AI brokers have been creating 4 occasions extra databases versus people.
In case you consider AI brokers as your individual large crew of high-speed junior builders (doubtlessly “mentored” by senior builders), it’s then not stunning that the identical capabilities the Neon crew centered on that made Neon nice for builders additionally made Neon nice for these AI brokers:
Postgres open supply ecosystem: All frontier LLMs have been educated on the huge quantity of public info obtainable concerning the Postgres open supply ecosystem, so all AI brokers are consultants in utilizing Neon, which is constructed on Postgres.
Velocity: Conventional databases have been designed for people to provision and function. It was OK to take minutes to spin up a database. Given AI brokers function at machine pace, extremely speedy provisioning time turns into crucial.
Elastic scaling and pricing: The decoupled storage from compute serverless structure permits extraordinarily low-cost Postgres situations. It’s now potential to launch 1000’s and even tens of millions of brokers with their very own databases cost-effectively.
Branching and forking: AI brokers will be non-deterministic, and “vibes” should be checked and verified. Neon’s capacity to immediately create a full copy of a database, not just for schema but in addition for the info, permits all these AI brokers to be working on their very own remoted database occasion in excessive constancy for experimentation and validation.
Shared DNA
We’ve got lengthy identified Nikita Shamgunov, Heikki Linnakangas, and Stas Kelvich – the founders of Neon. Earlier than Neon, Nikita began his profession engaged on SQL Server and later turned well-known within the database neighborhood as a co-founder and CEO of SingleStore, driving the startup’s enterprise to over $100M in annual income. Heikki has been a committer on Postgres for 20 years – he began his Postgres journey when he was bored on paternity go away and determined to look into Postgres internals for enjoyable. Stas is an ex-physicist who acquired into Postgres hacking as a result of he wanted a greater R-tree implementation for his tourism search engine startup.
Databricks and Neon share the identical DNA in constructing hardcore technical improvements on the infrastructure layer. We additionally share the assumption within the significance of open supply: we initially began the Apache Spark™ mission at UC Berkeley, which additionally occurs to be the unique birthplace of Postgres, the open supply database mission Neon builds on.
Wanting ahead
OLTP databases characterize a $100B market dominated by merchandise that have been constructed a long time in the past. We imagine it’s time for this market to be disrupted by builders and AI brokers. Along with the Neon crew, we stay up for constructing essentially the most developer and AI agent pleasant database platform.
What does this imply for current Neon clients and companions? We’re totally dedicated to the way forward for the Neon platform. The roadmap stays formidable, and we intend to proceed making Neon the perfect database platform for builders. After closing, current clients and companions can count on continued help and innovation – now with the total backing and assets of Databricks. It’s an awesome second for current Neon customers, and an thrilling one for builders simply discovering Neon. Go launch a brand new Postgres occasion on Neon right now!
We’re equally enthusiastic about what this may imply for Databricks’ enterprise clients. We plan to share way more on the upcoming Knowledge + AI Summit in San Francisco, June 9–12.
Try Neon’s weblog to listen to straight from them about why they’re excited to affix forces.
