He does not look like a man who is late for a meeting. Photograph via Materialize.
Profile
Chief Executive Officer
Materialize, Inc.
Nate
Stewart
The board member who kept showing up. Then, in April 2024, he took the top job at the streaming database company he had been quietly circling.
Michigan CS, MIT Sloan, Bloomberg backend, Microsoft cloud, Percolate product, seven years running the product organization at Cockroach Labs. And now, the operational data warehouse in Lower Manhattan.
The Profile
An engineer walks into a database company.
Nate Stewart is the CEO of Materialize, a New York streaming database company headquartered on Lafayette Street, and he got the job the interesting way. He did not answer a recruiter. He did not tweet his way in. He was already on the board. In April 2024, the founder, Arjun Narayan, moved to VP of Engineering, and Stewart moved into the corner office. It is a maneuver that reads, in retrospect, as inevitable, because Stewart has spent most of a decade orbiting the same set of people.
Consider the sequence. Stewart joined Cockroach Labs in 2017, at a stage when the company had not yet begun making money, as the head of product. Two of his colleagues there were Arjun Narayan and Nikhil Benesch, the eventual Materialize founders. In 2019 they left to build a streaming database on top of an academic paper about differential dataflow. In 2020, Cockroach Labs named Stewart to its board, the first non-founder and non-investor to sit there. By 2023 he had joined Materialize's board as an independent director as well, which is how a person ends up serving on the boards of two competing-ish database companies simultaneously, and how, when the CEO seat opens, there is a shortlist of exactly one.
The path before Cockroach is the sort of thing you can trace with a public records search and a couple of MIT press releases. Stewart earned a BS in computer science, with honors, from the University of Michigan. He then worked as a lead backend engineer at Bloomberg L.P., which is either the last honest apprenticeship in software or a large, quiet financial data monastery, depending on who you ask. From there he did an MBA at MIT Sloan, specializing in entrepreneurship and innovation, and won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. This is a thing MBAs win about once a year and then either commercialize or list on a LinkedIn profile in perpetuity. Stewart went to Microsoft afterward, worked on Cloud + Enterprise product, and then joined Percolate, a marketing SaaS platform that was later scooped up by Seismic. Then Cockroach Labs came calling.
You can read the resume as a portfolio of infrastructure that other software depends on. Financial data feeds. Cloud tools. Marketing pipelines. Distributed SQL. And now a streaming operational data warehouse that promises SQL views that stay incrementally up-to-date as new events arrive. There is a coherence to it that most careers do not have. When Stewart announced he was joining Materialize in April 2024, his line was: "The systems we interact with should reflect our dynamic world as it is in the moment, not as it was in the past." Which is, if you squint, a sentence about databases. It is also a sentence about how a person builds a career: by staying near the thing that keeps updating.
Where This Is Going
Ambitions, stated.
Stewart's public thesis is that AI systems will not be useful for very long if the data they read is stale. Language models and agents will hit an increasingly firm ceiling if the world they are answering about is 24 hours old. The company's job, as he frames it, is to move that ceiling. Materialize is the live memory. He would like it to be inevitable.
The near-term goals, as far as they can be inferred from company announcements and his own posts, are: scale the customer base past the current Series C headcount, publish more releases aimed at AI and agent workloads, and continue the slow, patient work of turning "operational data warehouse" from a phrase into a category.