July 2022 Summaries

Neon has completed its Series A-1 round, raising $30M to more than double its total funding to $54.3 million, enabling the company to invest in growing its engineering team, building out its product roadmap, and bootstrapping a GTM team. The funding will also support expanding developer relations and providing a robust developer experience, capitalizing on Neon's position as a popular choice for developers who have chosen Postgres as their database of choice. With this investment, Neon aims to grow its user base by opening new cloud regions, building team collaboration features, and improving productivity and cost savings. The company has received significant support from well-known investors and partners, including GGV Capital, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, and many others, and is committed to building a strong community around its product, with over 3,700 stars on Github and a growing user base.

Neon, a company focused on enhancing the Postgres experience in the cloud, has successfully raised $30 million in a Series A-1 funding round led by GGV Capital, bringing its total funding to $54.3 million. This new capital will be used to expand the engineering team, develop the product roadmap, and build out a go-to-market (GTM) team, with the aim of improving the developer experience through new features and cloud region expansions. Founded by Nikita Shamgunov and Heikki Linnakangas, Neon has drawn significant interest, evidenced by its 3,700 stars on GitHub and widespread user engagement during its technical preview. The company offers innovative features like serverless compute scaling, database branching for CI/CD pipelines, and a "time machine" capability to reset databases to previous states, all while maintaining full compatibility with Postgres applications. With support from prominent investors and a commitment to open-source principles, Neon is poised to continue growing its global team and improving developer productivity in the cloud database space.

The project Neon aims to create a new serverless Postgres service with a modern cloud-native architecture. It separates storage and compute to provide an excellent Postgres experience. The team made key decisions such as building their own storage from first principles, separating the WAL and page services, and leveraging cloud object storage for efficient data management. They also designed a system that keeps old page versions efficiently, making PITR operations quick and computationally cheap. This approach allows Neon to provide a robust and cost-efficient platform for running Postgres in the cloud.

Neon is developing a modern, cloud-native, serverless Postgres service that separates storage and compute to enhance performance and scalability while maintaining 100% compatibility with existing Postgres applications. Inspired by architectures like AWS Aurora but seeking to improve upon them by offering an open-source solution, Neon's design employs a smart storage layer to replace traditional filesystems, facilitating operations such as instant recovery, fast startup and shutdown of compute instances, and independent scaling of CPU and I/O resources. Key architectural decisions include separating the WAL (write-ahead log) and page services to improve durability and availability, as well as leveraging cloud object storage for efficient data retention and retrieval. This approach allows for cost-effective storage management, enabling features like Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) by storing historical page versions. By using immutable files and cloud storage, Neon aims to provide a robust and efficient platform for running Postgres, supporting branching, and allowing independent development of its architecture components.