# 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.

- **Role:** Founder and CEO at RisingWave Labs
- **Organizations:** RisingWave Labs
- **Education:** PhD, Computer Science (advisor: Kian-Lee Tan). Thesis: Transaction Management In Multi-Core Main-Memory Database Systems, National University of Singapore, Visiting PhD (host advisor: Andrew Pavlo), Carnegie Mellon University, Undergraduate (Excellent Graduate Thesis Award), South China University of Technology
- **Known for:** Founded RisingWave Labs and built RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL streaming database, Raised more than $40 million in funding, including a $36M Series A, Grew RisingWave's open-source project to thousands of GitHub stars

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Received DEBS Best Paper Award for the SPRINT Stream Processing Engine
- **2016-2019** — Published research at SIGMOD, VLDB, and USENIX ATC on transaction processing, concurrency control, and secondary indexing
- **pre-2021** — Researcher in the Database Group at IBM Almaden Research Center
- **pre-2021** — Software engineer on the Amazon Redshift team at AWS
- **2021** — Founded RisingWave Labs in San Francisco
- **2022** — RisingWave raised a $36M Series A to launch its cloud offering
- **2023** — Launched RisingWave 1.0; spoke at QCon San Francisco
- **2024** — Featured on Software Engineering Radio discussing streaming databases

## Achievements

- Founded RisingWave Labs and built RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL streaming database
- Raised more than $40 million in funding, including a $36M Series A
- Grew RisingWave's open-source project to thousands of GitHub stars
- DEBS 2013 Best Paper Award for the SPRINT Stream Processing Engine
- Manager's Choice Award at IBM Almaden Research Center
- Dean's Graduate Research Award, National University of Singapore
- Excellent Graduate Thesis Award, South China University of Technology
- Program committee member for SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE; organizer of AIDB, SMDB, and DEBS workshops

## Latest updates

- **2024-02** — Appeared on Software Engineering Radio (episode 605) to discuss streaming databases.
- **2025-07** — Shared a company update on LinkedIn about RisingWave's progress.

## Links

- Website: https://yingjunwu.github.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yingjun-wu
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/YingjunWu
- GitHub: https://github.com/yingjunwu

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/yingjun-wu
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-22