Neon

Engineer-at-heart with early stints at Microsoft and Facebook. He previously co-founded SingleStore (then MemSQL) in 2011, growing it to over $100M in revenue. The idea for Neon — a fully managed serverless Postgres with true separation of storage and compute — had been developing in his mind for years. Incubated at Khosla Ventures, he founded Neon in 2021. Neon ran 700,000 databases and raised over $100M before being acquired by Databricks in 2025. He also serves as a venture partner at Khosla Ventures.

One of the world's foremost PostgreSQL core committers, with over two decades of contributions to the project — most actively in storage, the Write-Ahead Log, and indexing. He initially explored Postgres internals during paternity leave out of curiosity and never stopped. He contributed to pgvector starting in 2023. He co-founded Neon in 2021 after Nikita Shamgunov sought him out to help build the world's first separation-of-storage-and-compute Postgres service, bringing unmatched depth in Postgres internals to the founding team.

Holds an M.S. in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from the National Research Nuclear University MEPhI in Moscow. An ex-physicist who got into Postgres hacking because he needed a better R-tree implementation for a tourism search engine startup he was building. He worked as a Software Engineer at Postgres Professional (2015–2020) and then at Yandex's database team (2020–2021). He co-founded Neon in 2021 at Nikita Shamgunov's invitation — the two had not met personally before the company — bringing deep database internals expertise to the serverless Postgres project.