Selivanov touts EdgeDB, which he co-founded in 2019 with Elvis Pranskevichus, as one of the solutions to the legacy database problem. EdgeDB’s open source architecture is relational, but Selivanov says that it’s engineered to solve some fundamental design flaws that make working with databases — both relational and NoSQL — unnecessarily onerous for enterprises.
In launching EdgeDB, Selivanov and Pranskevichus drew from their experiences at MagicStack, a Toronto, Canada-based software consultancy that they helped to co-found in 2008. In 2016, after observing the database hurdles that many of MagicStack’s clients were facing, Selivanov says that he and Pranskevichus realized the path forward was to become a product company.
“Our cloud database will track slow queries and suggest how to optimize the database layout or the queries. It will offer built-in performance tracing and turnkey integration with services like DataDog,” Selivanov added. “We don’t yet have any machine learning related functionality, but we are thinking about potentially building some data science capabilities directly in our database … We don’t have any concrete plans at this point, but this is an intriguing future vertical for us.”
EdgeDB remains pre-revenue, but Selivanov expects the company to start generating cash in Q4 2022, the tentative launch window for the premium EdgeDB Cloud. To date, 10-employee, San Francisco, California-headquartered EdgeDB has raised $4 million from Accel and angel investors including Greg Brockman, a co-founder and the CTO of OpenAI.
“In some of the areas we will be competing with various companies for developers mindshare, like Prisma, Supabase and maybe PlanetScale,” Selivanov admitted when asked about who he sees as top competitors. “[But] EdgeDB’s value proposition is unique as we drastically improve database data exchange across many areas simultaneously … We already see a successful grassroot movement with people starting to build real production applications with EdgeDB. We expect the traction to accelerate as soon as we launch our cloud product and native integration with Vercel in about a month.”
