Database Rocket Fuel from Neon, Firebolt, Tessell, Starburst
Startup advances in PostgreSQL, AI, data warehousing, multi-cloud, data lakehouse
Welcome to the Cloud Database Report. I’m John Foley, a long-time tech journalist, including 18 years at InformationWeek, who then worked in strategic comms at Oracle, IBM, and MongoDB. I invite you to subscribe, share, comment, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
Word is that Databricks may be looking to acquire database startup Neon for about $1 billion.
What’s behind the move, which was first reported by Alex Konrad at Upstarts?
The first thing to know is that Neon has developed a version of PostgreSQL, which is one of the database industry’s leading platforms and #4 in DB-Engines’ ranking of database popularity, ahead of Mongo, Snowflake, Databricks, and more than 400 other DBs.
Any vendor with a Postgres database will get a look from a wider global market of database users and shoppers. With Neon, Databricks could potentially raise its profile and strengthen its portfolio and capabilities in this crucial part of the market.
It’s worth noting that Databricks and Snowflake are already investors in Neon, as I reported here in the Cloud Database Report two years ago.
“Database startup Neon raised $46 million in Series B funding, bringing its total to $104 million, with Databricks and Snowflake among the investors. Neon developed its own vector extension, pg_embedding. “It uses one of the more modern algorithms, so it’s a lot faster” than pgvector, CEO Nikita Shamgunov told VentureBeat.”
And you can be sure that the newly emerging AI tech stack has something to do with Databricks’ interest in Neon, too. As Maria Deutscher at SiliconAngle reports, Neon’s support for vector embeddings and its speed of provisioning may also be factors, as Databricks, along with everyone else, quickly build out support for AI coding assistants and other AI use cases.
Here’s some background on Neon, which I wrote in 2022:
Neon, a startup, has joined the fray of PostgreSQL database providers with its new serverless PostgreSQL database, called Neon. All of a sudden, the PostgreSQL market is getting a bit crowded. In May, Google Cloud introduced AlloyDB, its own PostgreSQL offering.
In a blog post, CEO Nikita Shamgunov explains that Neon is not yet GA, but users can get on a wait list. “We expect to open it up for everyone soon,” he writes.
“We think we have an opportunity to define the standard for cloud Postgres,” he says. “We carefully designed our storage focusing on cloud independence, performance, manageability, DevX, and cost. We chose the most permissive open source license: Apache 2.0 and invited the world to participate.”
Interesting footnote: Shamgunov was co-founder of MemSQL, which changed its name to SingleStore in 2020.
Firebolt, Tessell, Starburst
While we’re on the topic of database startups, a few other updates…
It seems the best to way to break into the data warehousing market can be summed up in one word: performance. That’s the strategy of Firebolt, a startup that reached out to me recently with benchmarks comparing favorably in price/performance to Snowflake, Amazon RedShift, and Google Big Query. I first covered Firebolt in the Cloud Database Report in 2021 following its Series B financing round. Earlier this year, Firebolt brought in Hemanth Vedagarbha, a veteran of Oracle and Confluent, as President with a broad mandate. Hemanth and I overlapped at Oracle. I look forward to catching up with him and reconnecting with Firebolt sometime soon.
A belated congrats to Tessell for its recently announced Series B funding of $60 million. I know the exec team, including CEO Bala Kuchibhotla (another former Oracle person) and co-founder Bakul Banthia. Investors include WestBridge Capital, Lightspeed, B37 Ventures, and Rocketship.vc. Tessell is positioning itself as multi-cloud DBaaS, compatible with PostgreSQL and MySQL. In our conversations, the company points to its unified control plane, which simplifies management across databases and clouds, as one of its big selling points.
Starburst - Following the company’s FY2025 highlights, which included a 20% increase in new customers and a deal with Dell to use its analytics query engine in Dell’s Data Lakehouse, Starburst continues to show momentum. A few weeks ago, Starburst shared that it has hired Jitender Aswani as SVP of Engineering, whose resume includes StarTree, Moveworks, Netflix, and Facebook/Meta. (Firebolt and Starburst are examples of young companies building out the leadership bench as they expand in the enterprise, which was a signal I always watched for with InformationWeek’s ‘Startup City’ program years ago.) Stay tuned for more from Starburst, including a virtual event on May 28 that showcases “the future of Starburst.” Starburst’s tagline, “Rocket Fuel for AI,” was inspiration for the Gemini-generated illustration in this blog post.
What’s next in data and AI?
That’s a quick recap of some recent startup news. If you know of other database and data management startups I should know about, reach out to me on LinkedIn.
Near term, I will be Las Vegas next week for Informatica World 2025. Informatica was one of the first data management vendors to put focus on the critical importance of best practices in data management — data integration, quality, cataloging, metadata, observability, governance — as a foundation for enterprise AI strategy and deployment.
Now, the thinking that “good AI requires good data” is common wisdom across the tech industry. So I’m quite interested to hear what’s next from Informatica. Watch for my updates from the event in the days ahead.
