# Yu Xu

> Yu Xu is the founder and former CEO and CTO of TigerGraph, a graph database and analytics company founded in 2012. A UC San Diego computer science doctorate with prior experience at Teradata and Twitter, he built his career around parallel database systems and connected data. Databricks now lists him as Director of Product Management.

- **Role:** Director of Product Management at Databricks
- **Organizations:** Databricks, TigerGraph, Twitter, Teradata, University of California San Diego
- **Education:** Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego
- **Known for:** Founded TigerGraph in 2012 and led it through its 2017 public launch., Credited in his professional biography with 26 patents in parallel data management and optimization., Coauthored the 2019 TigerGraph native MPP database paper.

## Career timeline

- **circa 2000** — Worked at a San Diego startup founded by a former Ph.D. adviser; returned to doctoral study after the dot-com collapse.
- **before 2011** — Worked as Teradata’s Hadoop architect on big-data initiatives.
- **2011-2012** — Worked on Twitter’s data infrastructure before founding TigerGraph.
- **2012** — Founded the company initially known as GraphSQL.
- **2017** — TigerGraph launched publicly on September 19 with $31 million in Series A financing.
- **2018** — TigerGraph appointed his mentor Alin Deutsch chief scientist.
- **2019** — Coauthored TigerGraph: A Native MPP Graph Database.
- **2021** — TigerGraph raised $105 million in a Tiger Global-led Series C round.
- **2023** — Moved from CEO to CTO as Mingxi Wu took over as chief executive.
- **2025** — Named as a coauthor of the TigerVector research paper.
- **2026** — Listed by Databricks as Director of Product Management; coauthored June posts on data layout and full-text search.

## Achievements

- Founded TigerGraph in 2012 and led it through its 2017 public launch.
- Credited in his professional biography with 26 patents in parallel data management and optimization.
- Coauthored the 2019 TigerGraph native MPP database paper.
- Led TigerGraph when it raised a $105 million Series C round in February 2021.
- Coauthored the 2025 TigerVector paper on integrating vector search with graph queries.

## Latest updates

- **2026-06** — Databricks lists Xu as Director of Product Management. On June 16 he coauthored Accelerate search queries with full-text search indexes on Databricks.
- **2026-06** — Coauthored the June 1 Databricks post Debunking 8 data layout myths: why Liquid Clustering outperforms partitioning.
- **2025-05** — The TigerVector paper, with Xu among its authors, was revised on May 3 following its January 20 submission.

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuxusandiego/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/yu-xu
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-11