Neon

AcquiredRaised Since Featured

Ship faster

Serverless Postgres platform with autoscaling, branching, and scale-to-zero for modern applications and AI agents.

Founded January 2021San Francisco, CA~100 people$130M+ raisedFeatured at Series B

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Developer ToolsDatabasePostgresServerlessOpen SourceInfrastructureAi AgentsCloud

About

Neon reimagines PostgreSQL for the cloud era by separating compute from storage, enabling serverless scaling that automatically adjusts to workload demands. The platform introduces database branching with copy-on-write technology — letting developers instantly create full database copies for testing, previews, and CI/CD without duplicating data. With scale-to-zero capability, databases pause when idle and resume instantly, making it cost-effective for development and production workloads alike. Founded by PostgreSQL veterans including a 20-year Postgres committer, Neon's architecture streams WAL records to a custom multi-tenant storage engine, delivering point-in-time recovery and near-instant provisioning. The platform supports thousands of databases per project and has become a go-to infrastructure layer for AI agent frameworks that need to spin up isolated databases on demand.

DailyDropout Take

Neon bet that Postgres needed a ground-up serverless rewrite — not just a managed wrapper — and the $1B Databricks acquisition proved them right. With a team led by a 20-year Postgres committer and a former SingleStore CEO, they built the most developer-friendly Postgres platform on the market, making database branching as easy as git branching.

Discovery signal: PostgreSQL veterans founding team, novel compute-storage separation architecture, rapid developer adoption, strategic investor interest from Snowflake and Databricks

What Makes Them Unique

Neon's architecture separates compute from storage at the Postgres level, enabling true serverless scaling with scale-to-zero, instant branching via copy-on-write, and point-in-time recovery — capabilities no other managed Postgres offers natively. Built by actual PostgreSQL committers with decades of core database experience.

20.9k+

GitHub Stars

$130M+

Total Raised

$1B

Acquisition Price

1M+

Databases Managed

Target Markets

SaaS ApplicationsAI Agent InfrastructureDeveloper PlatformsStartups & SMBsEnterprise Cloud Migration

Founders

Nikita Shamgunov

Co-Founder & CEO

Former co-founder and CEO of SingleStore (MemSQL), driving it to over $100M in annual revenue. Previously worked on SQL Server at Microsoft. Deep expertise in database internals and distributed systems.

LinkedIn 𝕏Twitter

Heikki Linnakangas

Co-Founder

PostgreSQL committer for over 20 years. Core contributor to Postgres internals, leading Neon's storage engine integration with upstream PostgreSQL. Started contributing to Postgres during paternity leave.

Stas Kelvich

Co-Founder

Ex-physicist turned database engineer. Previously at Yandex on the database team. Built Neon's storage layer and WAL streamer. Originally got into Postgres hacking while building a tourism search engine.

Funding History

Seed$4M

Mar 1, 2021

Lead: Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures

Series A$30M

Jul 26, 2022

Lead: GGV Capital

GGV CapitalKhosla VenturesGeneral CatalystFounders Fund

Series B$46M

Aug 1, 2023

Lead: Menlo Ventures

Menlo VenturesFounders FundGeneral CatalystGGV CapitalKhosla VenturesSnowflake VenturesDatabricks VenturesElad Gil

Extension$25M

Aug 7, 2024

Lead: M12 (Microsoft)

M12 (Microsoft)Menlo VenturesNotable Capital

Acquisition$1B

May 14, 2025

Lead: Databricks

Databricks

Investors

Firms

Khosla Ventures(Lead — Seed)GGV Capital(Lead — Series A)Menlo Ventures(Lead — Series B)M12 (Microsoft)(Lead — Extension)General CatalystFounders FundSnowflake VenturesDatabricks VenturesNotable Capital