cloud-database
(7)
MongoDB
MongoDB escaped the rows-and-columns era by betting on flexible documents. Nearly two decades later, it is trying to become the memory, search engine and live data layer beneath the next generation of AI applications.
Aerospike
Aerospike built its reputation in the least forgiving corner of software: decisions that must be correct before the next millisecond arrives. Now the database specialist is turning that discipline toward AI, graph workloads and a managed cloud business.
Couchbase
Couchbase is an enterprise NoSQL database company whose distributed, document-oriented platform powers low-latency, high-throughput applications for large organizations. Its flagship products - Couchbase Server, the fully managed Capella database-as-a-service, and Couchbase Mobile/Lite for edge and offline use - combine key-value speed, JSON flexibility, SQL-style querying (SQL++/N1QL), full-text and vector search in a single system. Founded in 2009 and long a rival to MongoDB, Couchbase went public on Nasdaq in 2021 and was taken private by Haveli Investments in a $1.5 billion deal in September 2025.
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.
Neo4j
Neo4j is the company behind the world's most widely deployed graph database. It stores data as nodes and relationships rather than rows and tables, which makes connections - the part most databases treat as an afterthought - the main event. Used by a large majority of the Fortune 100 and a community of more than 250,000 developers, Neo4j powers fraud detection, recommendation engines, supply-chain analysis, and, increasingly, the knowledge graphs that ground generative AI in real facts (GraphRAG).
Imply
Imply is a San Francisco-based data analytics company that built its platform on Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database that its co-founders helped create. The company offers Imply Polaris, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service for real-time analytics, and Imply Lumi, billed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. With $215M in total funding and unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation, Imply serves 100+ enterprise customers including Atlassian, Reddit, and Cisco ThousandEyes, enabling sub-second query performance across terabytes to petabytes of streaming and historical data.
Tiger Data (creators of TimescaleDB)
Tiger Data - formerly Timescale - is the New York-based company behind TimescaleDB, an open-source PostgreSQL extension that began as a time-series workhorse and has grown into a full operational database platform for transactional, analytical, and agentic workloads. In June 2025 the company rebranded around its long-time tiger mascot and now ships Tiger Cloud, Tiger Postgres, and Agentic Postgres - a Postgres flavor purpose-built for AI agents with zero-copy forks, hybrid storage, BM25 and vector search, and an MCP server.