
Stas Kelvich, co-founder of Neon: $1B acquisition and databases for agents | Evil Martians podcast
From Dev Propulsion Labs by Evil Martians
March 10, 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…
People in this episode
Host: Victoria Melnikova
Guest: Stas Kelvich
Topics covered
- databases
- acquisition
- cloud computing
- Postgres
- software engineering
- entrepreneurship
Keywords
- Neon
- Databricks
- Postgres
- cloud
- acquisition
- software engineering
- Replit
- databases
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Neon, Databricks, Evil Martians, Replit
Places: Chroma
More episodes of Dev Propulsion Labs
- Matt Biilmann of Netlify: why agent experience is the new developer experience | Evil Martians · May 12, 2026 · 58 min
- Lingo.dev co-founder Max Prilutskiy: AI localization, AX, and having a lean team | Evil Martians · April 28, 2026 · 51 min
- Firestreak partner Amir Rustamzadeh: what VCs look for in devtools founders | Evil Martians podcast · April 14, 2026 · 59 min
- Anuraag Gutgutia, co-founder of TrueFoundry: trust closes enterprise deals | Evil Martians podcast · March 24, 2026 · 46 min
- CodeRabbit CEO Harjot Gill: going viral in Japan and AI code guardrails | Evil Martians podcast · February 23, 2026 · 39 min
- David Gomes of Cursor: why half of developers still aren't using AI | Evil Martians podcast · February 10, 2026 · 50 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Dev Propulsion Labs podcast page.