Stock grant to benefit efforts to advance growth of the open source PostgreSQL database in the U.S. and in Europe

SAN ​​FRANCISCO, Oct. 24, 2018 - ​​​​Citus Data, ​​a leading provider of scale-out Postgres database technologies, today announced it is donating 1 percent of its equity to the non-profit PostgreSQL organizations in the US and Europe. The United States PostgreSQL Association has received the stock grant and will work with the PostgreSQL Europe organization to support the growth, education, and future innovation of the open source Postgres database in both the US and in Europe.

To coincide with Citus Data’s equity donation, the company is joining the Pledge 1% movement, alongside well-known technology organizations such as Atlassian, Twilio, Box, and more.

Founded in 2011, the founders of Citus Data set out to bring the performance and economics of scale-out systems to the field of relational databases. To give applications the memory, compute, and disk resources of a distributed database cluster, the team at Citus Data created an extension to Postgres that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database—something that was previously not possible with any other relational database, whether proprietary or open source. The Citus database is a popular choice for multi-tenant SaaS businesses that need horizontal scale in order to grow their user base; and for enterprises with customer-facing, real-time analytics dashboards that require sub-second latency.

“When people think about contributing to open source and building sustainable open source communities, there are different approaches,” said Citus Data CEO Umur Cubukcu. “You can open source software you’ve created, you can maintain certain features and projects, and you can contribute to events with speakers and sponsorships—all of which our team spends a lot of time on. Today, we are excited to create a new way to contribute to open source, by donating 1 percent of our equity to the non-profit PostgreSQL organizations. As Ozgun Erdogan said in his blog post, we—the Citus Data founders—feel this 1% stock donation is a way for us to give back and to share a piece of our future success. And we believe the donation will make a real difference to future projects in the Postgres community.”

“One the most important issues in modern software is building sustainable open source models in the age of the cloud,” said RedMonk Analyst and Co-Founder James Governor, “Citus Data is both making an innovative bet, and paying it forward, by applying the 1% Pledge model to underpin the renaissance of the Postgres community”.

“The PostgreSQL community is committed to driving innovation on the world’s most advanced open source database. And to do this, we need advocates and community members to continue to do the great work they do… to invest time, energy, and resources into our always-evolving PostgreSQL database,” said Magnus Hagander, open source advocate, PostgreSQL core team member, and president of PostgreSQL Europe. “What do I think about this donation of 1 percent equity from the team at Citus Data? I think it’s a generous way to support the PostgreSQL community, and shines a light on the importance of supporting open source projects that underpin so many products and companies today.”

To learn more about the United States PostgreSQL Association (pgUS) visit: https://postgresql.us/

To learn more about Pledge 1% visit: https://pledge1percent.org/

To read the Citus Data CTO’s blog post on the 1% equity donation, please visit https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2018/10/24/why-citus-data-is-donating-1-percent-equity/