# PlanetScale

> PlanetScale is a San Francisco database company that turns the hard parts of running relational databases at scale into a managed cloud service. Founded in 2018 by the creators of Vitess - the MySQL-sharding system built at YouTube and later used by Slack, GitHub and Square - the company sells a serverless database platform known for non-blocking schema changes, branching workflows borrowed from Git, and, more recently, Metal instances built on locally-attached NVMe drives. In 2025 it extended the same platform to Postgres, chasing the fastest-growing part of the database market while still, in its own words, loving MySQL.

- **Founded:** 2018
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Jiten Vaidya (Co-founder, former CEO), Sugu Sougoumarane (Co-founder, former CTO; co-creator of Vitess)
- **Team size:** Roughly 110 employees; the company describes a small, senior team with over 600 years of combined database experience.
- **Products:** PlanetScale (MySQL / Vitess), Database branching & deploy requests, PlanetScale Metal, PlanetScale for Postgres, Neki
- **Notable:** Founders created Vitess at YouTube (2010) and grew it into a graduated CNCF project used by Slack, GitHub, Square and others., Raised roughly $105M total across seed through Series C from a16z, Insight Partners, Kleiner Perkins and SignalFire., Popularized Git-style database branching and non-blocking schema changes as mainstream developer workflows.

## Products & services

- **PlanetScale (MySQL / Vitess)** — Managed, horizontally scalable MySQL platform built on Vitess with automatic sharding, connection pooling, and high availability.
- **Database branching & deploy requests** — Git-style workflow for databases - create branches, make non-blocking schema changes, review them in deploy requests, and roll back safely.
- **PlanetScale Metal** — A node class running on locally-attached NVMe SSDs offering 'unlimited I/O', lower latency, and lower cost versus network-attached storage.
- **PlanetScale for Postgres** — Managed Postgres on the same platform, including Metal instances; general availability reached in 2025.
- **Neki** — PlanetScale's in-development horizontal sharding solution for Postgres.

## Achievements

- Founders created Vitess at YouTube (2010) and grew it into a graduated CNCF project used by Slack, GitHub, Square and others.
- Raised roughly $105M total across seed through Series C from a16z, Insight Partners, Kleiner Perkins and SignalFire.
- Popularized Git-style database branching and non-blocking schema changes as mainstream developer workflows.
- Launched PlanetScale Metal (2025) claiming 53% lower cost and 65% lower p99 latency versus Amazon Aurora.
- Extended the platform to Postgres in 2025, reaching general availability the same year.

## Latest updates

- **2025-03** — Launched PlanetScale Metal - database nodes on locally-attached NVMe drives with 'unlimited I/O.'
- **2025-07** — Announced PlanetScale for Postgres, extending the platform beyond MySQL/Vitess.
- **2025-09** — PlanetScale for Postgres reached general availability.
- **2025-11** — Teased Neki, a horizontal sharding solution for Postgres, as the next major roadmap goal.

## Links

- Website: https://planetscale.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/planetscale
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/planetscale
- GitHub: https://github.com/planetscale
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@planetscale
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/planetscaledata

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/planetscale
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-11