Databricks and Neon

Summary

Today, we are excited to announce that we have agreed to acquire Neon, a developer-first, serverless Postgres company. Neon’s co-founders are among the very few people in the world who could re-architect Postgres with true separation of storage and compute, built for modern developers and AI systems. Their world-class team of Postgres hackers and database veterans will join Databricks to deliver serverless Postgres at production scale to developers in an AI-native world. A developer-first mission, born from Postgres expertise Four years ago, the Neon co-founders joined together with a vision to disrupt the database industry. They observed that the foundations of database technologies were largely designed for the 90s era. Their goal was to build a new database platform that would dramatically improve experiences for developers, in some fundamental ways: They foresaw that Postgres would become the de facto standard for databases and had the vision to create a serverless Postgres platform. They were determined to make it possible to create a new Postgres instance in seconds, so developers wouldn’t need to wait. They set out to simplify the operational aspect of database scaling by automating it as load changed, so developers could start very small and not worry about over- or under-provisioning. They wanted to enable rapid experimentation and testing by supporting instant forking and branching of databases and creating fully isolated databases, as databases are often one of the most difficult modules to test in end-to-end application testing. A few years in, the Neon team engineered a new, innovative database architecture that decouples storage scaling from compute scaling, which ultimately enabled all of the above goals. When Neon first launched, developers raved about the speed, the simplicity, and the ability to branch and fork their databases like Git does for code. The shift toward AI agents As Neon became GA last year, they noticed an interesting stat: 30% of th...