Managed Postgres startup Tembo Data Systems Inc. today said it has raised $7 million in seed funding to further its mission of making the open-source database management system more accessible and available for a wide variety of uses.

The Cincinnati-based company was founded by Ry Walker, whose previous venture, the data orchestration platform Astronomer Inc., raised more than $280 million and achieved “unicorn” status with a more than $1 billion valuation. He started Tembo to address what he said are the tepid levels of support most managed service providers give their Postgres offerings.

Because Postgres, which is short for PostgreSQL, is so extensible, it’s easy for users to create highly customized configurations that are difficult to support. “Managed providers give you a straight-jacketed version mostly for support reasons,” he said. “The more they let users do, the more users can shoot themselves in the foot.” Although hundreds of open-source and commercial extensions exist for Postgres, most MSPs support no more than about 80, Walker estimated.

Chief Technology Officer Samay Sharma said MSPs have further incentive not to offer robust Postgres support because it can cannibalize their proprietary database offerings. Users can download and configure Postgres and extensions for themselves, but once they move to the cloud, “most MSPs will switch them to their version,” he said. “That makes continuous integration much harder.”

Tembo supports more than 200 Postgres extensions for data warehousing, retrieval-automated generation, recommendation model training, route optimization and planning and other uses. The open-source package manager it developed, called Trunk, contains “a ton of metadata nobody’s ever collected about extensions and stores it in a programmatic manner,” Sharma said. “We know which of these extensions require specific conflicts to be set and which require a restart. We know which have different libraries and dependencies. It allows us to provide users with a much more informed viewpoint about the entire ecosystem of extensions.”

Walker said Tembo supports all the extensions offered by the five largest Postgres MSPs and has added dozens more to its catalog. Customers can use Trunk to test extensions that aren’t currently supported and add them to Tembo’s approved list in as little as a few hours. Next year, the company plans to add the ability to support private extensions.

Postgres is one of the most widely used DBMSs. The 90,000 developers who responded to Stack Overflow Internet Services Inc.’s annual survey this year named it the most admired, desired and popular database. SolidIT Consulting & Software Development GmbH’s EB-Engines site ranks it the fourth most popular DBMS.

Walker said the funding led by Venrock Management LLC with participation from Fireroad Holdings Inc., CincyTech LLC and Wireframe Management LLC’s venture capital arm will go toward making Postgres more resilient and scalable. The company now relies on the open-source community and word-of-mouth to build awareness.

“I estimate there are 5 million Postgres databases in production right now,” Walker said. “If we build a great product, we should see inbound inquiries and not have to do much outbound marketing.”

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