Neon

History

2025: Databricks bought Neon for $1 billion

On May 14, 2025, the data processing, analytics company artificial intelligence Databricks announced the conclusion of an agreement on the purchase of developer DBMS Neon with Russian roots. The transaction amount will be about $1 billion.

Startup Neon Ball was founded in 2021. Its founders included Nikita Shamgunov, a native of Yekaterinburg, as well as software engineers Stas Kelvich and Heikki Linnakangas. The San Francisco-based company is developing a serverless, cloud-based database management platform. As of May 2025, the startup has raised about $130 million for development, and investors include the venture capital division of Microsoft M12, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures and Notable Capital.

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Фото: Freepik

According to Databricks, the acquisition of Neon technologies will combine a serverless relational database management system with its own analytical services. This is said to help customers deploy AI agents more efficiently. After the deal closes, the Neon team will join the Databricks.

The age of agent-driven AI applications is changing the way databases are approached. By implementing Neon in Databricks, we are giving developers serverless Postgres, "says Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks.

Databricks and Neon intend to work together to eliminate the traditional limitations of databases that require simultaneous scaling of computing power and storage resources. The companies say such a model creates some difficulties in deploying AI workloads. Databricks and Neon expect to eliminate performance bottlenecks, simplify infrastructure, reduce costs, and accelerate innovation.^[1]

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