Why Grand Invested in Tembo: Postgres today, Postgres tomorrow, Postgres forever

By: Nathan Owen

We’re excited to announce our recent investment in Tembo. We are joining lead investor, GreatPoint Ventures, alongside existing investors Venrock and Wireframe Ventures, and several others. Grand previously invested in Tembo between its Seed and Series A rounds, although we hadn’t announced this investment until now.

Tembo’s primary mission is to transform PostgreSQL (Postgres) from merely a database to a data platform. This move makes Postgres the developer platform of choice for nearly every application and data service scenario in the modern application stack.

Why invest in a Postgres focused company?

Postgres is a robust, open-source object-relational database system that utilizes and expands upon SQL. It is equipped with numerous features that allow for secure storage and scaling of complex data workloads. Postgres originated in 1986 as part of the POSTGRES project at the University of California at Berkeley. It has since enjoyed over 35 years of active development on its core platform.

You might wonder why a company would base itself on a 35-year-old database technology, and why Grand would invest in it. It’s a valid question.

Despite its late 20th-century origins, Postgres has gradually evolved over the decades. It has steadily gained momentum and, quite unexpectedly, hit its stride over the past decade. In 2023, it became the #1 database choice for developers. Various forms of Postgres can be found within all major cloud hyperscalers, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and a near-infinite variety of on-premise variants.

Despite the fact that literally hundreds of different databases, both open source as well as commercial, exist and are used today, the movement towards standardizing on Postgres has been gaining traction in the developer community. This represents a significant turning point from the current state of database landscapes, where database sprawl is the norm.

Why we invested in Tembo

Team

One of the enduring true-isms of venture capital is that you invest in prior founders that have proven themselves. Ry Walker was the founder and CEO of Astronomer when Grand invested in Astronomer’s Seed round in 2017. Astronomer, a data orchestration platform, based on Apache Airflow, has raised more than $280 million and achieved “unicorn” status back in 2022. Later Ry left Astronomer and founded Tembo to pursue the idea that Postgres could be enhanced to provide supported for the majority of database use-cases that exist in the market today such as Graph, Time-Series, Vector, Document, and a myriad of other database use cases.

Ry has assembled a rock star team, including a number of the top contributors / thoughts leaders in the Postgres space including CTO Samay Sharma (previously managed Postgres open source development at Microsoft), David Wheeler (creator / maintainer of PostgreSQL Extension Network (PGXN)), and others.

Market

Gartner estimates the global database market at approximately $100 billion (growing at 16.8% CAGR!) and Postgres has become the most loved, most used, and most wanted databases in the world. According to Gartner, the database market will surpass $200 billion by 2027, dramatically outpacing projected growth for the overall IT market of 4.3%.

With millions of active deployments, Postgres is growing faster than MySQL. It is battle-tested with a large community that can handle SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) queries and a wide range of workloads (i.e, analytical, time-series, document, graph, time-series, geospatial, etc), on account of its rich ecosystem of add-ons and extensions.

We believe Tembo is positioned to become one of the absolute leaders in the Postgres space.

Technology

Tembo has created a radically simpler way to build, deploy, and scale data services and applications on top of Postgres. Unlike traditional managed Postgres offerings, Tembo abstracts the complexity of deployment, configuration, management, and optimization, allowing developers to easily build and deploy highly specialized data services without needing to rely on multiple different database platforms, and teams of backend engineers, DevOps teams, database administrators, and data engineers. Key features of the Tembo platform include:

• Tembo Stacks: ‘Flavored’ Postgres instances supporting a variety of use-cases for the following workloads: transactional, vector, time series, machine learning, geospatial, OLAP, data warehousing, and more.
• Available both via Cloud-hosted (SaaS) and Self-hosted (On-Prem)
• Modern UI: Web-based user interface for managing Postgres instances.
• Developer friendly API: REST API for programmatic access to the Tembo Platform.
• Tembo Operator: Kubernetes operator that manages the lifecycle of Postgres instances.
• Tembo Monitoring: Monitoring and alerting for Postgres instances. Tembo Logging: Log aggregation and analysis for Postgres instances.
• Tembo Terraform Provider: Terraform provider for managing Postgres instances as code.
• Trunk Extension Registry: Extension registry that provides access to 200+ Postgres extensions.
• Tembo Apps: Add-on applications that run alongside your Postgres instances

Looking Ahead

Tembo will leverage the Series A funding to continue expanding it’s their cloud platform as well as on-prem version, adding more Stacks to support even more database use cases, and strengthening the team. You should check Tembo out!

We share in Ry’s excitement to be a part of Tembo’s journey and are optimistic about growth of this market and the opportunity for Tembo to disrupt it. We are also looking forward to working with our friends at GreatPoint Ventures, Venrock and Wireframe Ventures, and other investors to help Tembo deliver on their vision for making Postgres the ‘one database to run them all.

Note: Grand is actively looking for new DevOps and Developer toolchain software companies as a foundation in GVII. If you’re a founder in the DevOps and Developer toolchain space or a VC looking at deals within that space, let’s connect!