Neon Inc., a burgeoning startup specializing in a serverless distribution of the open-source Postgres database, has successfully secured million in a recent funding round. This investment was spearheaded by Microsoft Corp.’s M12 venture capital arm, with participation from existing investors such as Abstract Ventures, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, and Notable Capital. With this latest infusion, Neon’s total external funding has surpassed 0 million.
Neon’s commercial offering of Postgres, a relational database renowned for its enterprise applications, stands out due to its robust support for ACID compliance. This technology standard is pivotal in safeguarding data integrity by preventing errors from infiltrating users’ datasets. Additionally, Postgres is known for its extensibility, enabling organizations with specialized needs to tailor the database to their specific use cases.
Innovative Features of Neon’s Postgres Distribution
The company has enhanced its commercial Postgres distribution with several features designed to streamline database management. Notably, Neon has modified key components of the original open-source version, including the storage engine, which is responsible for managing data read, write, and delete operations.
One of the standout aspects of Neon’s offering is its serverless architecture. This design alleviates the burden of manual infrastructure management from administrators. The platform incorporates an autoscaling engine that dynamically adjusts hardware resources in response to changing workload demands, effectively mitigating the risks associated with overprovisioning.
Moreover, Neon’s architecture decouples storage from compute allocation, allowing developers to independently scale storage capacity without necessitating an increase in compute resources, and vice versa. This flexibility enables organizations to provision only the necessary hardware resources for specific tasks, thereby minimizing unnecessary infrastructure costs.
As Neon’s CEO, Nikita Shamgunov, articulated in a recent blog post, “The database only runs when needed, but is always available – and with the precise capacity required by the workload.”
Another innovative feature included in Neon’s Postgres distribution is branching. This capability allows developers to swiftly create new copies of data within a database environment. For instance, a software team could duplicate a sales database to test a new demand forecasting application. Furthermore, this branching tool is instrumental in disaster recovery scenarios, enabling administrators to revert to earlier data versions in the event of an error.
Neon’s database is also equipped to handle vectors, the mathematical constructs utilized by artificial intelligence models to process information. This functionality eliminates the need for customers to maintain a separate vector store alongside their primary database, thereby reducing operational overhead.
Since its inception in 2021, Neon has garnered a substantial user base, with several thousand paying customers and hundreds of thousands of developers utilizing its free tier.
According to TechCrunch, the recent funding will facilitate the hiring of 20 new employees by the end of the year, with a focus on expanding Neon’s engineering teams. Additionally, a portion of the funds will be allocated to making Neon’s database accessible on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.
