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

Postgres At Any Scale
Ozgun Erdogan Sumedh Pathak Umur Cubukcu

CO-FOUNDERS

Umur Cubukcu, Sumedh Pathak, Ozgun Erdogan

Our History

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.

Our Citus Journey

2011
JANUARY 2011

Founded Citus Data, moving to Istanbul from Seattle, Hyderabad, and San Francisco, to open the first office

JUNE 2011

Became a Y Combinator company, YC S11

2012
JULY 2012

First Citus user, MixRank, goes into production. “Deployment without a hitch!”

2013
MARCH 2013

Moved Citus Data headquarters to San Francisco

2014
APRIL 2014

Launched a PostgreSQL columnar store for analytic workloads (cstore_fdw)

JUNE 2014

First Citus blog post (of many) to hit #1 on the front page of Hacker News

DECEMBER 2014

First release of open source pg_shard extension to PostgreSQL

2015
MAY 2015

First of many PostgreSQL conference talks, this one at PGCon in Ottawa

OCTOBER 2015

Series A investment led by Khosla Ventures

2016
MARCH 2016

Unforked Citus & implemented Citus as a Postgres extension

MARCH 2016

Open sourced the Citus extension to Postgres

JULY 2016

GA of Citus Cloud, a fully-managed database as a service

2018
MAY 2018

Opened our 3rd global engineering office—in Amsterdam

NOVEMBER 2018

Donated 1% of Citus Data’s stock to the non-profit PostgreSQL organizations in the US & Europe

2019
MAY 2019

Introduced Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure Database for PostgreSQL

NOVEMBER 2019

Launched GA of Hyperscale (Citus), a built-in deployment option in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

2021
MARCH 2021

Added columnar storage to Citus & open sourced the shard rebalancer with the release of Citus 10

DECEMBER 2021

Opened the CFP for the first Citus Con: An Event for Postgres, a free and virtual developer event

2022
JUNE 2022

As of the Citus 11 release, you can now query from any node. And Citus is now 100% open source.

OCTOBER 2022

New home on Azure. You can now find the Citus managed database service in Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL.

NOVEMBER 2022

Opened the CFP for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023, a free and virtual developer event

2023
MARCH 2023

Announced the schedule for Citus Con: An Event for Postgres 2023, with 37 amazing virtual talks from 40 speakers

JULY 2023

As of the Citus 12 release, you can now distribute schemas.

Why we donated 1% of Citus stock to Postgres?

READ THE STORY

Our Citus and Postgres teams at Microsoft love working on Postgres, whether it be on the open source Citus database engine, or on Azure Database for PostgreSQL, or on our contributions to future versions of the PostgreSQL core. And as of October 2022, Citus has a new home on Azure—as Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL.

Join the Postgres Team at Microsoft

We are looking for PostgreSQL experts, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and contributors who want to work on the world’s most advanced open source relational database—and are eager to tackle the breadth of issues faced when running online database services, including challenges with availability, scale, query performance and processing, storage and networking optimizations, & more. We’re on a quest to build the world’s best Postgres—and we’d like your help.

JOIN OUR TEAM

Work on the most advanced open source relational database

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