companies

Neon

Serverless Postgres platform that separates storage from compute for instant autoscaling and database branching; acquired by Databricks in 2025.

Neon was founded in 2021 by Nikita Shamgunov, Heikki Linnakangas, and Stas Kelvich, three engineers with deep roots in the Postgres community — Linnakangas is a longtime core Postgres contributor, and Shamgunov previously co-founded SingleStore. The company rebuilt Postgres with storage and compute as separate layers, which is what makes its signature features possible: databases that scale to zero when idle, branches that copy a multi-gigabyte database in seconds via copy-on-write, and point-in-time restore down to the second. That architecture turned out to be a good match for AI coding tools. Products that generate a new app per user session call Neon's API to spin up a fresh Postgres instance programmatically, and Neon has said that more of its databases now get created by automated agents than by humans typing commands. Databricks announced its intent to acquire Neon in May 2025, in a deal reported at roughly $1 billion, to fold serverless Postgres into its Lakehouse and agent infrastructure. Neon continues to operate as a standalone product under the Databricks umbrella, with its own pricing, dashboard, and roadmap.

Founded

2021

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

infrastructure