streaming-database
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Yingjun Wu
Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, the San Francisco company behind RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database for stream processing. A database researcher turned entrepreneur, he earned his PhD at the National University of Singapore, was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon under Andy Pavlo, and worked on the AWS Redshift team and at IBM's Almaden Research Center before founding RisingWave in 2021. His goal is to democratize real-time stream processing by making it as simple, affordable, and accessible as writing SQL. The company has raised more than $40 million, including a $36 million Series A.
Materialize
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
RisingWave
RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database that lets developers ingest, transform, and serve real-time data using familiar PostgreSQL-compatible SQL instead of specialized stream-processing frameworks. Founded in 2021 by former AWS Redshift engineer Yingjun Wu, the San Francisco company decouples compute from storage in a cloud-native architecture, offers incremental materialized views, and integrates natively with Apache Iceberg to power a streaming lakehouse. Its open-source engine and managed RisingWave Cloud target fraud detection, monitoring, real-time analytics, and increasingly the data infrastructure behind agentic AI.
Nate Stewart
Nate Stewart is the CEO of Materialize, the streaming operational data warehouse based in New York. He took the role in April 2024 after seven years leading product at Cockroach Labs (CockroachDB), where he also sat on the board. He is a Michigan CS undergrad, an MIT Sloan MBA, and a former lead backend engineer at Bloomberg who won the MIT $100K entrepreneurship competition on his way out of business school.