Database Startups
The requirements to be on the list is that the company must fall in one of the two cases:
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It is the developer of a proprietary database or storage product.
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It is the main developing entity behind an open source database or storage project, and is focused as a company around that project.
And also be alive, or their product still supported if acquired. If it’s an OSS project largely developed by some company where their main product is something else (e.g. a project released by Baidu or LinkedIn), then it’s excluded from the scope. If it’s an OSS project with many equal contributors, that’s amazing for OSS, but this list is focusing on companies and not technology. If it’s a DBaaS company which just provides RDS-like hosting, but does no further development of and around the product, then it too is excluded. Also no ledger/blockchain.
The categorizations are clearly subjective. I’m aware that some companies fit into more than one category, some companies belong in their own category, etc. This mostly exists as dbdb.io doesn’t give a similarly easy way to filter and sort by some arbitrary sense of category, and has a narrower definition of database than what I’m interested in. Some companies pivoted to a database offering, and so the data is either their founding as a database company, or the first release of their database product.
OLTP/RDBMS Server/Hosted/Serverless
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CrystalDB (2022)
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Nile (2022)
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Neon (2021)
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Turso (2021)
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SQLite Cloud (2021)
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Xata (2020)
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Supabase (2020)
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Acquired Oriole, itself also founded 2020
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Planetscale (2018)
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Develops and commercializes Vitess, which was started in YouTube in 2010.
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Hopsworks (2017)
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Develops and offers hosted RonDB
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ProxySQL (2016)
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Crunchy Data (2012)
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Citus (2010) — Acquired by Microsoft in 2019
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MariaDB (2010)
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Develops and supports MariaDB, which forked from MySQL in 2009.
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SAP (2010)
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SAP was founded in 1972. SAP HANA is their database, released in 2010.
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Volt Active Data (2009) — formerly VoltDB
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VistaDB (2007)
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Percona (2006)
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EnterpriseDB (2004)
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Acquired by Green Hill partners in 2019, then Bain Capital in 2022.
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Kingbase (1999)
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FairCom (1979)
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Oracle (1977)
HTAP SQL
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CedarDB (2023)
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MatrixOrigin (2021)
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Timescale (2017)
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YugabyteDB (2016)
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PingCAP (2015)
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CockroachDB (2014)
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SequoiaDB (2011)
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SingleStore (2011) — Formerly MemSQL
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NuoDB (2010) — Acquired by 3DS
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LeanXcale (2010)
OLAP SQL
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Mooncake Labs (2024)
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DuckDB-in-Postgres via Mooncake-Labs/pg_mooncake
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TableSpace (2024)
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Polars (2023)
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ParadeDB (2023)
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DuckDB-in-Postgres via paradedb/pg_analytics
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MotherDuck (2022)
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VeloDB (2022) — Built on Apache Doris
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Splitgraph (2022) — Acquired by EDB
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Datafusion-in-Postgres via splitgraph/seafowl
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StarRocks (2021)
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VoltronData (2021)
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MyScale (2021) — Fork of ClickHouse
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ClickHouse (2021)
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ClickHouse started as a project in 2009. The company was founded in 2021.
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DataPelago (2021)
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Hydra (2021)
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DuckDB-in-Postgres via duckdb/pg_duckdb
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PieCloudDB (2021)
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SelectDB (2021) — Built on Apache Doris
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Databend (2021)
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Oxla (2020)
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StarTree (2020)
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Develops and commercializes Apache Pinot
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e6data (2020)
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Tinybird (2019) — Hosted++ ClickHouse
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Firebolt (2019)
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CheetahDB (2018)
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DuckDB (2018)
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Starburst (2017)
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Developers of Trino, which forked in 2019 from PrestoDB, itself released 2013.
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HashData (2016)
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Open sourced as CloudBerryDB in 2023
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Oushu (2016) — Fork of Apache HAWQ
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Ocient (2016)
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Clickhouse (2016)
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Imply Data (2015)
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Develops and commercializes Apache Druid
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Dremio (2015)
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Yellowbrick (2014)
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Vitesse Data (2014) — Fork of Greenplum
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Brytlyt (2013)
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HEAVY.AI (2013) — Formerly MapD
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Acquired by Opensignal in 2024
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Databricks (2013)
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Snowflake (2012)
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SQream Technologies (2010)
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Kinetica (2009)
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Cloudera (2008)
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Originally offered commercial Hadoop, and later Impala and Kudu.
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XtremeData (2005)
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Vertica (2005)
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Acquired by HP in 2011, Micro Focus in 2017, then OpenText in 2023.
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Greenplum (2003)
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Exasol (2000)
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Teradata (1979)
Document
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Endatabas (2023)
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Fireproof Storage (2022)
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Sneller (2021)
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Stately (2021)
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FerretDB (2021)
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XTDB (2018)
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JSONBIN.io (2017)
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HarperDB (2017)
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Coretex AG (2014)
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FaunaDB (2012)
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Couchbase (2010)
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Exist Solutions (2010) — ExistDB, which was started in 2000
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Hibernating Rhinos (2009) — RavenDB
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Acquired by IBM in 2014.
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MongoDB (2007)
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MarkLogic (2001)
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Nexedi (2005)
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Company founded in 2005. Develops NEO, a fork(?) of ZODB.
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Graph
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FalkorDB (2023) — Fork of RedisGraph
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ArcadeDB (2021) — Fork of OrientDB
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OrientDB was founded in 2012, acquired by CallidusCloud in 2017, itself acquired by SAP in 2018. SAP dropped support in 2021, so founder started ArcadeDB to continue OrientDB.
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RageDB (2021)
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NeuroDB (2020)
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Ultipa (2019)
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TerminusDB (2019)
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Dgraph (2016)
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Memgraph (2016)
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Bitnine (2013) — AgensGraph
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LambdaZen (2013) — lambdazen/bitsy
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Galaxybase (2013)
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TigerGraph (2012)
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VelocityDB (2011)
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Dydra (2011)
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Sparsity Technologies (2010)
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Spin-off from the Data Management group at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.
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Neo4j (2007)
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Cambridge Semantics (2007) — AnzoGraph
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Acquired by Altair in 2024.
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BlazeGraph (2006) — Acquired by Amazon in 2022
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Stardog (2005)
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OntoText was founded in 2000. They first released OWLIM in 2004, which was renamed to GraphDB.
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Franz (2004)
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Develops AllegraGraph. Franz was founded in 1984, and also does their Allegro CL common lisp support.
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Timeseries
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OpenObserve (2022)
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GrepTimeDB (2022)
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ReductStore (2021)
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CnosDB (2021)
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Polar Signals (2020)
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Continuous profiling and not actually timeseries
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polarsignals/frostdb
is embedded columnar database, like DuckDB
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Chronosphere (2019)
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Provides support for and develops M3DB, which itself began in 2014 within Uber.
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QuestDB (2019)
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Development started in 2014, company wasn’t formed until 2019.
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DolphinDB (2018)
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VictoriaMetrics (2018)
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SiriDB (2016)
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Grafana Labs (2014)
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Largely working on visualizations, but also develop grafana/mimir
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Warp10 (2013)
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InfluxData (2012)
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DB4IoT (2010)
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QuasarDB (2009)
Search
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Quickwit (2021)
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Meilisearch (2018)
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Manticore Search (2017)
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A fork of Sphinx Search
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OnceDB (2016) — For
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Typesense (2016)
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Algolia (2012)
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Elastic (2012)
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Splunk (2003)
Other/Multi-Models
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SpiralDB (2023) — Multi-model analytics
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Polypheny (2022) — Multi-model
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TigerBeetle (2022) — Financial
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Dragonfly (2021) — Redis
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Surreal (2021) — Multi-model
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AuthZed (2020) — Authorization
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EvitaDB (2020) — E-commerce
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Dolthub (2018) — Git-like MySQL
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CodeNotary (2018) — ImmuDB immutable database
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EdgeDB (2018) — Object
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MagicStack founded in 2008. Developed Caos ORM. Database first released in 2018.
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TileDB (2017) — Array
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YottaDB (2017) — Embedded Key-Value
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TypeDB (2016) — Multi-model
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Unsure precisely. They use "polymorphic" and "Enhanced Entity-Relationship". It supports graph and document-style queries though.
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ArangoDB (2015) — Multi-model
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CrateDB (2013) — Multi-model
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Datomic (2012) — Datalog "datomic facts"
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ScyllaDB (2012) — Wide column. (Cassandra-compatible)
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Redis (2011)
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Redis hosting from 2011-2015. Redis creator joined in 2015, left in 2020. Now leads development of Redis.
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DataStax (2010)
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Contributes heavily to Cassandra, which is wide column with its own CQL.
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Aerospike (2009) — Key-Value
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Hazelcast (2008) — Key-Value
Queues
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Hatchet (2023)
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S2 (2023)
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WarpStream (2023)
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AutoMQ (2022)
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Momento (2021)
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Redpanda (2019)
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Confluent (2014) — Kafka, which was released in 2011
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84codes (2012)
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Hosted RabbitMQ and cloudamqp/lavinmq
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RabbitMQ (2007)
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Rabbit Technologies Ltd. was acquired by Spring Source/VMWare in 2010, then by Pivotal in 2013, which itself was acquired by VMWare in 2019.
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(Stateful) Streaming
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RisingWave (2023)
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Denormalized (2022)
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Arroyo (2022)
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TimePlus (2021)
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EMQ (2021)
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EMQ was founded in 2012, and released HStreamDB in 2021.
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DeltaStream (2020)
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Materialize (2019)
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ReadySet (2019)
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EventStoreDB (2019)
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Veverica (2014)
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Develops and commercializes Apache Flink. Acquired by Alibaba in 2019.
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AI and Vectors
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DeployQL (2024) — DeployQL/LintDB
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turbopuffer (2023)
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MegaPortal (2023) — CloseVector
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InfiniFlow (2023)
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Vespa (2023)
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Vespa was opensourced by Yahoo in 2017. Company founded around it in 2023.
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LanceDB (2022)
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Marqo (2022)
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FeatureBase (2022)
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Founded as Molecula in 2017. Released FeatureBase in 2022.
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PostgresML (2022)
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Chroma (2022)
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Qdrant (2021)
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Spice AI (2021)
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Weaviate (2019)
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Pinecone (2019)
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ApertureData (2018) — Vectors & Image/Video/Document
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FeatureForm (2017)
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Zilliz (2017) — milvus-io/milvus