# Kannan Muthukkaruppan

> Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB — a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for cloud-native applications at global scale. A gold medalist from IIT Madras and UC Berkeley alumnus, Kannan spent 13 years at Oracle (PL/SQL compiler) and Facebook (scaling HBase for billions of users) before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016. Under his technical leadership, Yugabyte raised $298M in funding, achieved unicorn status at a $1.3B valuation, and built one of the most respected open-source distributed databases in the industry.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Yugabyte
- **Organizations:** Yugabyte, Facebook, Oracle, Nutanix, IIT Madras Alumni Association
- **From:** India
- **Nationality:** Indian-American
- **Education:** Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
- **Known for:** President's Gold Medal from IIT Madras (1992) — best academic record across all disciplines in the 1988-92 batch, UC Regents Fellowship at UC Berkeley, Pioneered HBase adoption at Facebook for production workloads, including Facebook Messenger

## Career timeline

- **1988-1992** — B.Tech. Computer Science at IIT Madras; graduated with President's Gold Medal
- **1992-1994** — M.S. Computer Science at UC Berkeley on UC Regents Fellowship
- **1994-2007** — Consulting Member of Technical Staff at Oracle — worked on PL/SQL Compiler and Virtual Machine group for 13 years
- **2007-2013** — Technical Lead at Facebook — led HBase development, scaled Cassandra, built Facebook Messenger storage infrastructure, created XHProf profiler
- **2011** — Presented at QConLondon on database technologies
- **2013-2016** — Engineer at Nutanix — worked on core data path, deduplication, and erasure coding for distributed cloud storage
- **2016** — Co-founded Yugabyte with Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin in February 2016
- **2018** — Yugabyte raises $16M Series A (June 2018); YugabyteDB open-sourced
- **2019** — Named STAR #43 at IBCN 2019 — recognition among India's top tech leaders
- **2020** — Yugabyte raises $30M Series B
- **2021** — Yugabyte raises $48M Series C (March) and $188M Series C+ (October), achieving unicorn status at $1.3B valuation
- **2025** — Speaker at IMDA Developer Xperience Summit in Singapore on the future of AI, data, and developer innovation

## Achievements

- President's Gold Medal from IIT Madras (1992) — best academic record across all disciplines in the 1988-92 batch
- UC Regents Fellowship at UC Berkeley
- Pioneered HBase adoption at Facebook for production workloads, including Facebook Messenger
- Created XHProf, a lightweight PHP profiler that became widely used and was open-sourced
- Built XHProfLive — Facebook's real-time function-level performance monitoring system
- Co-founded Yugabyte in 2016 and grew it to a $1.3B unicorn with $298M in total funding
- Led development of YugabyteDB, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database used globally
- Named STAR #43 at IBCN 2019 among India's top technology leaders
- Hosted 100+ episodes of YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talks series

## Latest updates

- **2025-05** — Scheduled to speak on the opening panel at IMDA Developer Xperience Summit in Singapore, discussing the future of AI, data, and developer innovation
- **2025-03** — Yugabyte filed annual financial statements for the year ended March 31, 2025
- **2024-11** — Yugabyte expanded its board with new director appointments at Yugabyte Software Private Limited
- **2024-03** — Hosted YugabyteDB Friday Tech Talks Episode 100: Distributed Data Modeling in YSQL

## Links

- Website: https://yugabyte.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kannanmuthukkaruppan
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/virtualkm
- GitHub: https://github.com/kmuthukk
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@YugabyteDB
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kannan/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/kannan-muthukkaruppan
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-12