On a mission to create the world’s best Postgres experience, together

Our three co-founders Umur Cubukcu, Ozgun Erdogan, and Sumedh Pathak met at graduate school at Stanford. After graduating, Ozgun and Sumedh landed engineering jobs at Amazon in Seattle, and Umur went to make his mark at Boston Consulting Group.

The three were not apart for long. Just five years later, working on NoSQL data architectures, Ozgun thought to himself: there has to be a better way, a way to scale out a database without having to give up transactions, joins, and foreign keys. And in that kernel of frustration, the idea for Citus Data was born. Our team at Citus embraced the relational database—while also extending it to make it horizontally scalable, resilient, and worry-free. Instead of re-implementing the database from scratch, we would build upon PostgreSQL and its open and extensible ecosystem.

Once Ozgun, Umur, and Sumedh decided to found the company, they moved to Istanbul to open their first office—and began the hard work of building a company: hiring, coding, architecting solutions, securing office space, naming, incorporating, funding, applying to Y Combinator, moving to San Francisco, and ultimately creating the open source Citus database extension that scales out Postgres. (You can find our Citus open source repo on GitHub.) Fast forward to 2019 when Microsoft acquired Citus Data. At Microsoft, we’re in the next phase of our distributed PostgreSQL journey, continuing to bring you PostgreSQL at any scale—both as open source and in the cloud on Azure.