Phillip Merrick, a serial entrepreneur who co-founded or led three companies that have sold for a combined $1.2 billion, is back in the startup scene as the CEO and co-founder of a new open-source database company that's he's now bringing out of stealth mode.
The company, pgEdge Inc., which incorporated last fall in Alexandria, comes out the gate with a $9 million seed financing round led by Arlington venture firms Sands Capital Ventures and Grotech Ventures — and, Merrick said, prospects to grow bigger than any other company he's led.
For reference, he said, he last helmed Frederick cloud security company Fugue, which sold last year after his departure to Boston-based Snyk in 2022 for more than $100 million. Before that, he was CEO of SparkPost, an email delivery company based in Columbia that was acquired by MessageBird for $600 million in 2021. And then there's webMethods, the software company he co-founded in 1995 and shepherded through a 2000 initial public offering that saw a 508% first-day gain in its share price and grew to more than $200 million in annual revenue before eventually selling to SoftwareAG for $546 million in 2007.
But with pgEdge, he said he's delving into a database market that he thinks is bigger than the other markets his past companies were targeting.
“Every company on the planet has databases. Not everybody needs cloud security,” Merrick said. “But it's just a very large opportunity because every company has hundreds, if not thousands, of databases. And we believe that those databases need to be distributed. You need them to be distributed so that everybody can have fast access, no matter where in the world they're coming in from.”
PgEdge, founded in the summer of 2022 by Merrick and Denis Lussier, the company’s chief technology officer, has created a platform that copies databases using open-source technology, PostgreSQL, so websites can run faster, even in locations that sit a great distance from servers.
He's contending with tech giant Oracle Corp.'s (NYSE: ORCL) proprietary technology, which already solved the question of how to distribute databases across a network to increase site speed. In 2010, Oracle bought Unix vendor Sun Microsystems, which owned a rising open-source database management called MySQL, for $7.4 billion. MySQL is often considered a faster, easier, more accessible counterpart to PostgreSQL, which can tackle more complex data queries.
But Merrick said he's banking on companies looking for an alternative to Oracle’s proprietary software and instead opting for the community license of pgEdge's open-source database platform. He sees market penetration and competition, and overcoming skepticism about pgEdge's technology, as his biggest hurdles, hoping to win clients over with his promises of increasing website speed even when servers slow or shut down.
He said he plans to use the new seed funding to modestly grow the local company's engineering, sales and customer success teams to hone its pgEdge Cloud database-as-a-service offering, then push it further out into the marketplace. Merrick declined to give the exact number of pgEdge employees, saying only the fully remote company has about “15, 20 people.”
In the next 12 to 18 months, the company plans to seek Series A financing to further expand its sales and marketing efforts — but within reason, Merrick said. He said he's adhering to one of his key lessons as the company grows: "We will not be allowing our expense growth to get out ahead of revenue growth."
Instead, he said, the key is nabbing, and keeping, a deep customer base.
"Making sure customers are absolutely happy and that you are meeting and exceeding their expectations and you're delivering on all the reasons why they bought the product in the first place," Merrick said. "That's how you build a business."
