Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast

From Dev Propulsion Labs by Evil Martians

March 9, 2026 · 59 min · Season 4 · Episode 13

About this episode

Stas Kelvich discusses his journey from quantum physics to co-founding Neon and the implications of the $1B Databricks acquisition.

Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B Databricks deal and the agent era | Evil Martians podcast In this episode of Dev Propulsion Labs, Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon and member of technical staff at Databricks, shares how he went from quantum field theory to becoming a key Postgres contributor, why Neon bet on building their own cloud instead of just the database, and how the $1B Databricks acquisition closed in 30 days with 90 lawyers. He explains why Neon skipped sharding, how Replit's agents stress-tested their infrastructure overnight, and why the current moment is a gold rush for builders who stay in the loop. Victoria Melnikova is a business and go-to-market expert for developer tools and AI, and host of Dev Propulsion Labs. She works with 40+ early-stage startups a year as Head of New Business at Evil Martians. https://x.com/vmelnikova_en Evil Martians is a design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. https://evilmartians.com/ Recorded at Chroma. Vector, full-text, regex, and metadata search. Develop locally and scale to petabytes in the cloud backed by object storage. Serverless search and retrieval that is fast, cheap, and…

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