VillageSQL Raises $35M to Reignite Innovation in MySQL

Today, we are excited to launch VillageSQL to give the MySQL community a new path forward by enabling permissionless innovation via extensions. As founders with decades of experience building databases and storage infrastructure at Google and Amazon, we created VillageSQL to reignite innovation in MySQL. We have an experienced team of database leaders, engineers and investors behind us. Along with our launch, we are thrilled to announce that we have raised $35M in funding, across Seed and Series A rounds, led by FirstMark, GV (Google Ventures) and Spark Capital, with participation from Homebrew and strategic angel investors.

Problem: The MySQL Innovation Gap

MySQL continues to be the world's most used open-source database, but in the era of Agentic AI, there’s no question it has fallen behind. In recent years, open-source relational databases have been a tale of two diverging ecosystems. We saw the growth in popularity of PostgreSQL and the stagnation of MySQL, which led us to ask “why?” We found that while PostgreSQL thrived on a culture of openness and extensibility—allowing developers to rapidly build tools for the Agentic AI era—MySQL remained relatively static. Developers who love MySQL were forced to migrate to PostgreSQL for new projects to get access to modern features like vector search. A clear “innovation gap” emerged, holding back the MySQL community. 

Solution: Permissionless Innovation via Extensions

We saw a clear need to close this innovation gap. VillageSQL solves this problem by introducing a "tracking fork" of MySQL that includes an extension framework. This allows developers to add custom data types, functions, and indexes (coming soon), inside the database engine without waiting for a central authority to release new features. VillageSQL is a drop-in replacement that allows application developers to extend MySQL to start supporting new and emerging workloads such as AI or data analytics. 

Team: Deep Database Expertise

VillageSQL is built on a foundation of decades of database and infrastructure technical expertise and management experience. Our team has spent their careers building systems at some of today’s leading technology companies. As co-founders, Dominic provides the strategic vision and technical leadership gained from years at Google and Amazon, while Steve brings a notable track record from his 21 years in engineering leadership at Google. There, he served as the Tech Lead for Bigtable and Colossus, leading fleetwide distributed file systems and databases. Our broader team is composed of senior engineers and database experts from Google, AWS, and Oracle. This includes Tomas Ulin, who led MySQL engineering at Oracle for 15 years. We truly couldn’t ask for a better group of people to join us as we embark on our mission. We are also hiring across engineering and technical roles to help us accelerate delivery of that mission.

We believe the future of databases is community-driven. We invite developers, DBAs, and the open-source community to download the alpha release, join us on Discord, and help us build a new path for MySQL.

Dominic Preuss (Village Steward/CEO) and Steve Schirripa (Village Architect/CTO) - Co-Founders

For media inquiries, please contact press@villagesql.com