Neon Joins Databricks to Build the Future of AI Infrastructure Together

Today, we’re excited to celebrate Neon’s acquisition by Databricks.

When we first saw Neon two years ago, we were actively searching for innovation in the database space. We developed a thesis that the market needed a cloud-native OLTP database–essentially a Snowflake equivalent for interactive transactions with row-level locking and separation of storage and compute.

The discovery came unexpectedly when our teammate Derek mentioned Neon during a casual conversation in our Menlo Park office kitchen. That night, I couldn’t wait to explore their technology—staying up late testing it on personal projects. The experience was revelatory: We had finally found exactly what we’d been seeking.

Within days, we arranged a meeting with Nikita. The connection was immediate—by the following week, I was even doing high-intensity interval training with him at the local gym. This combination of thesis-driven investment approach and hands-on product validation allowed Menlo Ventures to move with both confidence and speed, culminating in our Series B investment.

Neon’s revolutionary architecture stands at the intersection of database innovation and AI evolution. When we first invested in 2023, the performance and devex of Neon’s product—serverless Postgres with lightning-fast auto-scaling, copy-on-write branching, and time travel—was already resonating with developers, making it the emerging favorite OLTP database for modern app builders.

But since then, Neon has also become the database backbone for tomorrow’s intelligent applications. As AI agents and workloads are growing increasingly ephemeral, dynamic, and stateful, they demand infrastructure that can match their complexity and speed—precisely what Neon delivers, and will continue to do as part of Databricks.

This acquisition underscores a profound market shift: Postgres is emerging as a core primitive for building AI applications. By combining Neon’s cloud-native capabilities with Databricks’ AI expertise, we’re witnessing the formation of infrastructure perfectly calibrated for an AI-driven future—where databases don’t just store information but actively enable machine intelligence to flourish.

Today, we at Menlo proudly congratulate Nikita Shamgunov, Heikki Linnakangas, Stas Kelvich and the entire Neon team on their announced acquisition by Databricks. Watching Neon’s remarkable growth over these past two years has been both exciting and validating. Your journey exemplifies the kind of technical excellence and market vision we seek to support.