Nikita Shamgunov

Nikita Shamgunov is the co-founder and chief executive of Neon, the serverless Postgres database company acquired by Databricks in 2025 for approximately $1 billion. Russian-born and trained in computer science, Shamgunov built his career in distributed systems and databases at some of the world's largest technology companies before turning to entrepreneurship.

Shamgunov's first major venture was SingleStore (originally MemSQL), a distributed SQL database company he co-founded in 2011 and led as CEO before moving to the role of Chief Technology Officer, helping build it into an established player in real-time analytics. His engineering background also includes stints at Microsoft, Facebook (Meta) and Bay Area infrastructure teams, giving him deep exposure to the operational demands of database systems running at massive scale.

In 2021, Shamgunov co-founded Neon to rethink Postgres for the cloud-native era, introducing a serverless architecture that separates storage and compute, enables instant database branching, and allows databases to scale to zero when idle. The design proved especially well-suited to AI application development, where developers and autonomous coding agents needed to spin up and tear down databases rapidly, and Neon became a default database layer for many AI-assisted coding and agent platforms.

Neon grew quickly on the strength of its open-source core and generous free tier, raising funding from investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst and Notable Capital. In May 2025, Databricks announced it would acquire Neon for roughly $1 billion to give its Data Intelligence Platform a first-class serverless Postgres offering aimed at developers building with AI agents, a deal that closed later that year with Neon continuing to operate as a distinct product within Databricks.

Shamgunov has remained a visible commentator on the database industry, speaking frequently about the shift from human-driven to agent-driven software development and its implications for database design. His career, spanning two venture-backed database companies and a landmark acquisition, has made him one of the more consequential builders in the modern data infrastructure landscape.