It started as the open-source answer to Firebase. Then AI coding agents adopted it as their default backend, and Supabase doubled its valuation to $10.5 billion in eight months.
The 48-year-old database company reinvented itself as the landlord of the AI boom - and a half-trillion-dollar order book to prove it.

For 50-plus years Cincom quietly sold the software that runs behind other companies' sales quotes and customer letters. It also kept alive one of computing's most influential programming languages.
BigchainDB is a blockchain database offering decentralization, immutability and native assets.
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.
InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB, the open source time series database purpose-built for high-volume, timestamped data from sensors, applications, infrastructure, and IoT devices. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Evan Kaplan and founder/CTO Paul Dix, InfluxData rebuilt its engine in Rust on the Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flight, and Parquet stack for InfluxDB 3. The platform is used by more than 1,900 paying customers - including Tesla, IBM, Cisco, PayPal, and Nordstrom - to collect, store, and analyze real-time data at scale.
Greptime is an open-source database company building GreptimeDB, a unified observability database that stores metrics, logs, traces, and wide events in a single engine on object storage like Amazon S3. Written in Rust and built on Apache Arrow and DataFusion, it separates compute from storage to cut costs at scale and speaks both SQL and PromQL. Founded in 2022 by ex-Alibaba and Ant Group engineers, Greptime positions GreptimeDB as a drop-in replacement for the Prometheus, Loki, and Elasticsearch stack, serving customers across connected vehicles, IoT, and observability.
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.
Upstash is a serverless data platform built for developers who deploy at the edge. Its flagship product is a Redis-compatible database that talks over HTTP instead of a persistent TCP connection, which makes it work inside serverless and edge runtimes where traditional Redis breaks. Around that core it has added QStash (a serverless message queue and scheduler), Upstash Vector (a serverless vector database), Search, and Workflow (durable serverless functions). Everything is priced per request with a guaranteed cap, so developers start free and pay only for what they use. Founded in 2020 by ex-Hazelcast engineers, Upstash powers Vercel KV under the hood and reached $1M ARR two years after its seed round.
Redis is the company behind the world's most popular in-memory data store, the open-source database that began as a side project by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009 and now sits in the stack of most of the internet's largest applications. It sells managed and self-hosted enterprise versions - Redis Cloud and Redis Software - layered on the open-source core, and has pushed hard into real-time AI use cases like vector search and LLM memory. After a turbulent 2024 licensing fight that spawned the AWS-backed Valkey fork, Redis returned to an open-source license (AGPLv3) with Redis 8 in 2025.
Cockroach Labs builds CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database engineered to survive failures the way its namesake insect does. Founded in 2015 by three ex-Google engineers, the company combines the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility of a traditional relational database. CockroachDB powers mission-critical workloads at banks, retailers, gaming platforms, and AI companies that need to stay online through outages, scale across regions, and keep data inside specific jurisdictions for compliance.
ParadeDB is an open-source PostgreSQL extension that brings Elasticsearch-quality full-text search and analytics directly into Postgres, removing the need to copy data into a separate search engine. Built in Rust on the Tantivy library, its pg_search extension delivers BM25-ranked search, faceting, and columnar analytics while preserving Postgres ACID guarantees and avoiding the brittle ETL pipelines that connect Postgres to Elasticsearch. Founded in 2023 by Philippe Noel and Ming Ying and backed by Y Combinator and Craft Ventures, ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A in 2025 and counts Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards among its users.
ClickHouse is the open-source columnar database engineered for real-time analytics on petabyte-scale data. Born inside Yandex in 2009 and spun out as ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021, it now powers analytics for Anthropic, Tesla, Sony, Meta, Lyft, and roughly 3,000 other paying customers as a managed cloud service.
PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for hybrid transactional and analytical workloads. TiDB scales horizontally across cloud and on-prem deployments, and now powers AI agent workloads through TiDB X with built-in vector search.
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.

Yugabyte builds YugabyteDB, the open-source distributed SQL database designed for mission-critical cloud-native applications. Founded in 2016 by three ex-Facebook engineers who built Cassandra and HBase, Yugabyte combines full PostgreSQL compatibility with the horizontal scalability and fault tolerance of modern distributed systems. Deployed in 100+ countries and trusted by Fortune 100 companies including GM, Kroger, Shopify, and Charles Schwab, YugabyteDB handles over 1 million transactions per second while surviving node, zone, and region failures automatically. A $1.3B unicorn backed by Lightspeed and Sapphire Ventures, Yugabyte is the rare database company that made its entire core product fully open source - and built a thriving enterprise business around it anyway.