mysql
(6)
Oracle
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.
Sam Lambert
Sam Lambert is the CEO and President of PlanetScale, the database company built on Vitess, the MySQL scaling technology that once powered YouTube. A database engineer by trade, he started as GitHub's first DBA in 2013 and spent roughly eight years there, rising to VP of Engineering leading a 350-person infrastructure and platform organization through the era GitHub scaled to tens of millions of users. After a short stint at Facebook working on internet-scale video infrastructure, he joined PlanetScale as an investor and advisor, became Chief Product Officer, and was named CEO in July 2021. He is known for a product philosophy centered on databases that 'just work' and never go down, a bias toward taste and craft, and blunt views on leadership.
Directus
Directus is an open-source data platform that wraps any SQL database with an instant REST and GraphQL API plus a no-code admin app, letting developers and non-technical users manage content and data without building a backend from scratch. Founded on a project Ben Haynes started in 2004 and incorporated as a company in 2020, Directus has surpassed 30 million downloads and is used by organizations including Adobe, Bose, Tripadvisor, AT&T and the U.S. Navy.
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.
Artie
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.