mysql
(4)
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.
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.