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. (Ok, well, two of our co-founders met earlier than that, but let’s not complicate things.) 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 rolled up their sleeves to do the hard work of building a company: architecting solutions, coding, hiring, securing office space, naming, incorporating, funding, applying to YC, moving to San Francisco, logos, websites—and building the team of Citus and Postgres experts who are still with us today at Microsoft.