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Neon — Startup ProfileServerless Postgres — the developer-first branchable database, now a Databricks companyHQ: San Francisco, CA (Databricks company; R&D across US/Netherlands/Germany/Israel) | Founded: 2021 | Employees: ~160-180 total, ~120 engineers | Stage: Acquired by Databricks (May 2025, ~$1B reported) | Website: https://neon.comAboutNeon is the serverless Postgres company founded in 2021 by veteran database engineers and incubated at Khosla Ventures. Its founding bet was to re-architect PostgreSQL with true separation of storage and compute — a custom Rust storage engine (Pageserver + Safekeeper with Paxos-like consensus) underneath a vanilla, unforked Postgres compute layer — so databases become serverless: autoscaling, scaling to zero, bottomless storage, free-tier-friendly. On top of that architecture Neon built capabilities no other Postgres service can match: instant copy-on-write branching (per-PR, per-developer, per-agent database environments), point-in-time restore ('time travel'), and live-migration autoscaling, all in a 100% PostgreSQL-compatible, Apache-2.0 open-source codebase (github.com/neondatabase/neoKey Metrics

Acquisition Value (Databricks): ~$1B (reported)

Last VC Round: $25.6M strategic (M12/Microsoft, Aug 2024)

Total Funding: ~$130M

Est. ARR (May 2025): ~$25M (Sacra est.)

Agent-Provisioned DBs: 80%+ of databases

Open-Source Traction: ~22,900 GitHub stars

Funding Rounds

Round: $5M (2021-03) — Khosla Ventures (incubation)

Round: $19M (2021-07) — Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Founders Fund

Round: $30M (2022-07-26) — GGV Capital (now Notable Capital)

Round: $46M (2023-08-01) — Menlo Ventures

Round: $25.6M (2024-08-07) — M12 (Microsoft's venture fund)

Key People

Nikita Shamgunov

Heikki Linnakangas

Stas Kelvich

Nikita Kogut

Key Competitors

Supabase —

PlanetScale —

CockroachDB —

AWS Aurora / RDS for PostgreSQL —

Timeline Highlights

2026-09-10: Claimable Neon

2026-08-11: Electric joins Neon

2026-07-15: Neon Backend Beta

2026-02/03: Lakebase GA

2025-09-25: Postgres 18 Day-0