postgres
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Ry Walker and the trouble with arriving
He co-founded Astronomer, stepped away in 2022, and started again with Tembo. For the Cincinnati software builder, the interesting work keeps moving back to the beginning.
EDB and the art of leaving Oracle.
The hard part of replacing a database is everything built around it. EDB sells a way to carry that history into Postgres - and now wants to keep AI close to the same data.
The Postgres Company That Let AI Write the Signups
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.
thorntale
thorntale (YC W24) is a San Francisco software company that built presentation tools for data storytelling. Instead of screenshotting charts from Looker or Snowflake into Google Slides, teams could connect live data sources directly into decks, so charts stayed interactive and up to date - even re-segmentable during a live Q&A. Founded in 2024 by data scientist Dori Wilson with engineers Ellen Hui and John Stimac, the company later pivoted toward an AI-powered presentation editor and shipped a free AI Presentation Review tool before winding the core Presentations product down at the end of 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.
DBOS, Inc.
DBOS, Inc. is a San Francisco- and Cambridge-based developer infrastructure company commercializing durable execution technology born from a joint MIT-Stanford research project led by Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker and Apache Spark creator Matei Zaharia. Its flagship open-source library, DBOS Transact, adds crash-proof workflow orchestration and built-in observability to ordinary Python and TypeScript programs by persisting application state in Postgres, so software resumes exactly where it left off after a failure - without a separate workflow server. The company pairs the library with DBOS Conductor and DBOS Cloud for managing and hosting reliable backends, AI agents, and long-running workflows.
Qian Li
Qian Li is the co-founder and CEO of DBOS, Inc., a Cambridge- and San Francisco-based company turning a once-academic idea into infrastructure: store a program's execution state inside Postgres so crashed apps and AI agents resume exactly where they left off. A Stanford computer science PhD, she co-founded DBOS in 2023 out of a joint Stanford-MIT research project led by Postgres creator Mike Stonebraker and Spark co-creator Matei Zaharia. She was named to the Silicon Valley Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2025, won a USENIX ATC Best Paper award for INFaaS, and is a regular voice on systems podcasts and conference stages on durable, observable, scalable software.
ParadeDB
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.
Jacqueline Cheong
Jacqueline Cheong is the co-founder and CEO of Artie, a San Francisco data infrastructure company that streams changes from production databases into warehouses in real time using change data capture. A UC Berkeley applied math graduate who spent her early career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and a software investor at the hedge fund Balyasny, she switched sides of the table in 2023 to build the kind of company she used to underwrite, co-founding Artie with her husband and CTO Robin Tang. After going through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, the pair grew Artie to a roster of enterprise customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy processing more than 700 billion rows a year, and raised a $12 million Series A led by Standard Capital's Dalton Caldwell in January 2026, on top of a $3.3 million seed.
Philippe Noël
Philippe Noël is the co-founder and CEO of ParadeDB, an open-source Postgres extension that brings Elasticsearch-grade full-text search and analytics directly into the database, eliminating the brittle ETL pipelines companies build to sync Postgres with a separate search engine. A Harvard computer science and economics graduate raised in rural Quebec, he previously co-founded the cloud-browser startup Whist before pivoting into ParadeDB during a contracting stint. In 2025 ParadeDB raised a $12M Series A led by Craft Ventures, with customers including Alibaba, Modern Treasury, and Bilt Rewards.