Ry Walker has been making big bets on data for years.
His new venture looks to raise the stakes again, with plans to borrow from the same playbook that took his previously launched company, Astronomer, to unicorn heights. Walker is off to a fast start and is already making bets the startup will grow larger than his previous firm.
Since its launch in November, CoreDB, a commercial open-source company based on the popular database, Postgres, has hired a dozen employees and closed a $6.5 million oversubscribed fundraising round, while firmly planting its roots in the Cincinnati region.
Walker is leaning heavily into his Astronomer learnings to do it.
The fundraise was led by Palo Alto-based Venrock, with participation from Avondale-based CincyTech and San Francisco’s Wireframe Ventures, along with other tech angel investors.
All three venture capital firms are previous Astronomer backers.
Of his 12 current employees, a few are former Astronomer team members. Walker said he plans to add more from his previous company.
And CoreDB, like Astronomer did with Apache Airflow, is aiming to dig its heels into a thriving open-source project, meaning one publicly accessible for a community of volunteer developers who continually create, modify and distribute code as they see fit.
Astronomer commercialized Airflow, a platform that helps companies better manage large sums of data, recruiting 16 of the platform's top 25 all-time contributors to its ranks.
CoreDB’s mission is to modernize Postgres in the same way.
While Postgres is considered “the most loved" database used by developers, Walker said, it’s currently “super invisible” to those outside the tech community. It competes with giants like Oracle and Snowflake, the latter which raised $3.4 billion with its 2020 initial public offering, meaning there's big market opportunity.
“With Airflow, we jumped on the horse while it was running and figured out how to get the saddle on from there,” Walker said. “It's the same thing here. We’re going to build a company around it, dig our heels in and become part of the (Postgres) community.”
CoreDB’s main play centers around helping Postgres users take advantage of thousands of available extensions, or add-ons that modify how the database performs certain processes. There's even the possibly to “collapse the modern data stack,” he said, the suite of tools or technologies needed for data integration, or the combination of data from multiple sources into one dataset for use.
Walker said “tool sprawl” is currently a prevalent issue.
Organizations end up using a multitude of options that serve similar or overlapping purposes, leading to inefficiencies.
The company’s target customers are developers striving for efficiency and Fortune 500 firms, which largely all use Postgres currently.
“Our goal would be to find out, are they happy with their vendor for that? And how could it be better?” Walker said.
The platform is currently in a private beta phase. CoreDB in April opened a waitlist with the goal of opening it up to all users by the end of the year. Walker called that plan “very ambitious,” but he’s projecting fast growth.
Walker expects his headcount to grow to 15 over the next few months. Roughly half of CoreDB’s employees are local. The company calls University of Cincinnati’s 1819 Innovation Hub home.
“This has potential to be a really big company – bigger than Astronomer for sure,” Walker said.
“There's so many people using this technology, now it’s about can we build a solution and a product that’s differentiated and interesting enough to win users over. It's a strong enough technology that it deserves a firm that can go head-to-head with the likes of Oracle or Snowflake. Our mission is to be right up there with them when all is said and done.”
Walker said he plans to hold onto the CEO title longer than he did at Astronomer. He passed the reigns over to Joe Otto after four years in 2019 when the startup was “about 20 people going on 200.”
Recently, Walker was able to sell a lot of his shares in the company at the peak of its valuation, officially exiting as a part-time adviser in November 2022, just ahead of the launch of CoreDB.
Otto led Astronomer through multiple fundraises, including a $213 million round Series C in March 2022.
Otto recently stepped down to a board role as Astronomer has simplified its organizational structure. Astronomer, which ballooned to a staff of more than 350, has cut about 40% of its team this year, but still "maintains its global footprint and strong balance sheet," the company said.
Walker said his goal is to hire as many CoreDB employees in Cincinnati as he can. As with Astronomer, he’s hoping the company can help raise the region’s profile nationally.
“I’m energized and working as hard as ever,” Walker said. “I made it to the other side of the startup journey. If can get 20 other founders over the hump, I’ll feel like I paid my debt to society.”
