distributed-database
(8)
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.
BigchainDB
BigchainDB is a blockchain database offering decentralization, immutability and native assets.
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.
TigerGraph
TigerGraph is a Redwood City-based software company building a native, massively parallel graph database and analytics platform designed to find patterns across deeply connected data in real time. Founded in 2012 by Dr. Yu Xu, it powers fraud detection, anti-money laundering, customer 360, recommendation engines and, increasingly, the relationship-intelligence layer behind enterprise AI and GraphRAG. Its cloud-native platform, TigerGraph Savanna, lets organizations query trillions of edges with the GSQL query language across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
Spencer Kimball
Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database built to survive almost anything you throw at it. Long before databases, he co-wrote GIMP as a Berkeley class project in 1995, spent roughly a decade as an engineer at Google working on its file-system guts, and built a photo startup that Square acquired. He named his database after the one creature famous for being nearly impossible to kill - which turned out to be the perfect pitch.
Dylan Cui
Dylan Cui is a co-founder of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - one of the world's most widely adopted open-source distributed SQL databases. A software engineer by trade, Dylan co-built TiDB from scratch starting in 2015 after experiencing firsthand the pain of database scaling at scale while working at Wandoujia. PingCAP has raised over $341 million and TiDB has more than 33,000 GitHub stars, serving thousands of enterprises globally across fintech, gaming, and e-commerce.
Max Liu
Max Liu (刘奇) is co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, the company behind TiDB - an open-source distributed SQL database designed for hybrid transactional and analytical processing (HTAP). He co-founded PingCAP in 2015 after stints at JD.com and Wandou Labs, solving the database scaling crisis at hyperscale. Under his leadership, PingCAP raised $341.6M in total funding including a $270M Series D, and TiDB now serves customers including Pinterest, Plaid, Bolt, and Atlassian. In 2025, Liu was named one of The Top 50 Software CEOs of 2024 by The Software Report.
Matt Cain
Matt Cain is a technology executive who served as Chair, President, and CEO of Couchbase from April 2017 through September 2025, guiding the company from a growth-stage NoSQL database startup through a 2021 NASDAQ IPO and ultimately a $1.5 billion acquisition by Haveli Investments. With an engineering degree from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford, Cain built his career across a decade at Cisco Systems, senior roles at Symantec, and the presidency of Veritas Technologies' worldwide field operations before joining Couchbase. Under his leadership, Couchbase expanded from pure NoSQL into a multi-model developer data platform powering AI-enabled applications for global enterprises.