Electric is joining Databricks to add our data primitives and reactivity to Lakebase and help make it the best platform for building apps and agents.
It's a big change for Electric. There are implications for Cloud users but everything we've previously open sourced stays open source. Ultimately, by joining Neon at Databricks, we'll have the platform to take sync to the next level.
✨ Key links
See the Databricks announcement and what this means for Electric users.
Aligned from day one
The first time that we came to San Francisco to raise funding for Electric, we were introduced to Nikita Shamgunov, Co-founder and CEO of Neon.
We were building Postgres to SQLite sync at the time. Nikita was fairly fresh from building his previous company, SingleStore, which was a distributed-SQL database that was wire-compatible with MySQL.
His advice was stark. Stop syncing from Postgres to SQLite. The type-impedance is going to be a massive pain. Why not sync Postgres to Postgres instead?
The next day, he shared an experimental repo that his co-founder, Stas Kelvich has been working on, that cracked running Postgres locally in WASM.
There had been previous WASM postgres projects, but they had all been VM-based, with overhead and a large build. What Stas' project gave us was a pure WASM build that was radically smaller and faster.
Suddenly the idea of running Postgres in the client actually become viable:
That repo became the basis of PGlite. Now Electric's most widely-used project at 13M downloads a week.
Since then, Neon has been our most popular Postgres integration and powered the majority of Electric Cloud sync services. So, in a real sense, Neon seeded both the strategy and technology behind Electric.
Electrifying Neon
So why join Neon at Databricks now? It's because Lakebase Postgres is now a core primitive shared across Neon and Databricks and Neon is expanding to become a complete backend platform.
That takes more than raw database engineering. It takes world-class DX and AX (agent experience) wrapped up into the right data primitives.
Apps and agents run on live data. Users expect interfaces that update instantly. Agents need realtime state and coordination through the data layer.
That's what we do at Electric. That's what Databricks is building around Lakebase.
The stack of the future
Lakebase is serverless Postgres for apps and agents. With scale-to-zero, native branching and support for both OLTP and OLAP.
By combining Electric’s sync and local execution with the scalability and capabilities of Lakebase, apps and agents get a supercharged Postgres stack for optimal fast, reactive development, local query execution at machine speed and deployment at scale, for workloads of any scale.
This is the stack of the future. We were always aligned with Neon but the opportunity to execute on this is now.
What this means for you
Everything Electric has previously open sourced stays open source: Postgres Sync, PGlite, TanStack DB, Durable Streams.
Electric Cloud is winding down. Cloud users will need to self-host or move to another provider. We've contacted every existing cloud user directly. If you're affected, we'll support you through the transition and there are a number of options available for seamless continuity of hosting with professional support.
Moving forward, Electric will be building with Neon inside Databricks. You can see how a Neon backend fits together and how the platform is evolving.
What's next
To everyone who has adopted and contributed to Electric, we want to say a huge thank you. Together, we proved that sync is the future. Not just for apps but also for agents. We couldn't have done this without you.
Now, as part of Databricks, we have the platform to take sync to the next level.
For more on this news, read the Databricks announcement. If you haven't already, now is a great time to start something on Neon and follow along as we ship:
npx neon@latest init