PgDog Raises $5.5M Seed to Scale PostgreSQL

PgDog (pgdog.dev), an open source proxy that handles connection pooling, load balancing, and horizontal sharding for PostgreSQL, has raised $5.5M in seed funding. The round was led by Basis Set Ventures, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and other investors.

The company was founded by Lev Kokotov, who built the storage infrastructure team at Instacart and sharded its Postgres databases during the company's rapid growth in 2020. He's a second-time technical founder who previously co-founded PostgresML.

PgDog sits between an application and its Postgres databases as a proxy. It can load balance traffic and shard databases without changes to application code or database extensions. It's designed for managed databases like AWS RDS and can serve as a drop-in replacement for PgBouncer, RDS Proxy, and other Postgres scaling products. It also works with Aurora, Cloud SQL, Supabase, and Neon.

Written in Rust, PgDog is fully open source and already seeing real production usage. It's handling more than 2 million queries per second in production across dozens of deployments, and has sharded over 20TB of data. The project has accumulated over 1.4 million Docker pulls on GitHub and counts more than 50 open source contributors.

The thesis behind PgDog is straightforward: databases like MongoDB and DynamoDB exist largely because Postgres has a scaling problem. If you could make Postgres work at 100TB+ with a million queries per second, most teams wouldn't need anything else. PgDog aims to be that scaling layer, sitting in front of standard Postgres instances.

PgDog is a three-person team today. It's built to run anywhere: in a customer's cloud, on-prem, or on a laptop, with no dependencies or hidden serverless costs. The company is also building an Enterprise edition to simplify deployment on AWS, with SLA-backed support.

With the new funding, the team says they have years of runway and plan to make Postgres work at any scale.