.png)
June 9 2026
"You're an AI fund. What brings you to PgDog? We're not an AI company." Lev Kokotov, the founder and CEO of PgDog, asked me the first time we met.
Here's the answer. We think some of the most well-positioned companies sit below the AI, building the infrastructure that makes the whole stack reliable. Models are remarkable at producing code. They are not good at producing operational excellence, the kind that keeps a database serving millions of queries a second from falling over at 3am.
Plus, the build-versus-buy decision was never about whether you can build it. It's about who owns the responsibility when it breaks, and a serious company would rather hand that to someone who has done it before.
Lev has done it before. He scaled Postgres at Instacart through the 2020 surge in demand, when the database was the bottleneck every single time. He leaned on those hard-won insights to create an open-source product anyone can deploy.
The traction speaks for itself. PgDog runs in production at companies like Reducto, Ramp, Modal, Huntress, and TripStack, serving more than two million queries a second across dozens of deployments. Modal says they run thousands of pods and couldn't have scaled this far without it. Ramp says it removed a major bottleneck.
Postgres is the most popular database in the world and the default for nearly every new company. But it has one well-known weakness: scaling. Every fast-growing company eventually outgrows a single Postgres instance, and getting past that wall has historically meant years and ten engineers building in-house sharding (ask Figma or Notion), or an expensive, risky migration off the database your team actually likes.
PgDog makes that wall disappear. It's a proxy you put in front of any Postgres to add horizontal sharding, connection pooling, and load balancing, with no extensions, no database modifications, and no migration. It just works, anywhere: RDS, Aurora, on-prem, your own cloud, or your laptop. PgDog runs everywhere.
Postgres should be the only database you'll ever need. PgDog is the team finally making it scale. We're proud to lead their $5.5M seed round, alongside YC, Pioneer Fund, and other great investors.