
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.
PingCAP is the company behind TiDB, an open-source, MySQL-compatible distributed SQL database built for hybrid transactional and analytical workloads. TiDB scales horizontally across cloud and on-prem deployments, and now powers AI agent workloads through TiDB X with built-in vector search.