ParadeDB
YC S23San Francisco, US · Founded 2023 · 11 employees · Hiring · 3 known investors
ParadeDB is a Postgres extension that adds full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregation capabilities to PostgreSQL databases. It enables developers to consolidate search and analytics workloads into a single database using standard SQL without requiring a separate search engine.
Also known as Retake
Data & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareAnalyticsOpen SourceInfrastructureDatabasesUnited States of AmericaAmerica / CanadaPartly Remote
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (S23)
ParadeDB was founded in 2023 by Philippe Noël and Ming Ying.
PN
Philippe Noëlin𝕏Co-Founder, CEOPhilippe Noël studied computer science at Harvard, graduating in 2020, and previously worked at Microsoft and Whist before founding ParadeDB.
Investors · 3
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements$12M disclosed across 1 round · 2025
- $12MSeries AJul 2025 · 3 sources
Craft Ventures (lead)
Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
The YC application· Summer 2023 batch
Alumni Q&A
- How did your company get started? (i.e., How did the founders meet? How did you come up with the idea? How did you decide to be a founder?)
- Founders Phil and Ming met at university in 2016 and later built Whist, a cloud-hybrid browser, with a team of 20 from 2020 to 2023. They joined YC S23 with a sustainability platform, but after talking with over 50 customers found more demand for the underlying infrastructure than for the product itself, leading them to pivot into ParadeDB.
- What's the history of your company from getting started until the present day? What were the big inflection points?
- The company started during the YC batch in summer 2023, first releasing pg_search for full-text search in Postgres, then pg_analytics for analytics a few months later. The two were combined into a single Postgres extension, and the founders are now productionizing them and serving larger customers.
- What is the core problem you are solving? Why is this a big problem? What made you decide to work on it?
- The founders are addressing the gap between Postgres' native full-text search and analytics capabilities and dedicated data stores like Elasticsearch, workloads relevant to SaaS, finance, retail, and other industries.
- What is your long-term vision? If you truly succeed, what will be different about the world?
- The company aims to support the "Postgres for everything" approach, letting companies run more of their data infrastructure on Postgres in an open-source manner without vendor lock-in.
Summarized from the founders' answers on their Y Combinator profile.
Images
Competitors · 9
by search overlapElastic170 shared keywordsElastic develops search-powered software for enterprises, offering products for search, observability, and security built on Elasticsearch. The company positions its technology to help organizations use their data for AI applications.
Meilisearch96 shared keywordsMeilisearch is a flexible, user-focused search engine that can be integrated into websites and applications, offering full-text, semantic, hybrid, and multimodal search capabilities with sub-50 millisecond response times.
Netezza86 shared keywordsIBM is a global technology company whose business spans enterprise software (including Red Hat, HashiCorp, and Confluent), IT infrastructure such as mainframes, servers, and storage, and IT consulting services. The company is also investing heavily in quantum computing and AI-based enterprise offerings, including its Lightwell open-source software security clearinghouse and the Anderon quantum wafer foundry.
MongoDB74 shared keywordsMongoDB is a cloud database company that provides Atlas, a multi-cloud data platform for transactional, search, and generative AI workloads, along with enterprise on-premises options and integration tools for developers and partners.
Zilliz57 shared keywordsZilliz provides Zilliz Cloud, a managed vector database and "vector lakebase" built by the creators of Milvus, offering real-time serving, iterative discovery, and batch analytics on a single data source at large scale. It supports vector, text, JSON, and geospatial data with hybrid retrieval, filtering, and reranking for enterprises building AI and retrieval-augmented generation applications.
Algolia56 shared keywordsAlgolia provides an API platform that enables developers to integrate search and discovery functionality into websites and mobile applications, serving thousands of companies across e-commerce, media, and SaaS.
Luigi's Box53 shared keywordsLuigi's Box provides an AI-powered search and product discovery suite for e-commerce businesses, including features such as autocomplete search, recommendations, product listing, a shopping assistant, a conversational agent, and analytics. It serves online stores looking to improve conversion rates and integrates with any tech stack.
Pinecone49 shared keywordsPinecone provides a vector database and knowledge engine that enables AI applications with semantic search and retrieval capabilities. It serves developers and enterprises building AI applications across industries.
Coveo49 shared keywordsCoveo provides an AI-powered search and recommendation platform used by large enterprises to power search experiences across websites, customer service, and employee-facing applications. Its technology applies GenAI to improve relevance, deflect support cases, and drive revenue.
Companies competing with ParadeDB for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
In the news
Frequently asked questions
- What does ParadeDB do?
- ParadeDB is a Postgres extension that adds full-text search, vector retrieval, and aggregation capabilities to PostgreSQL databases. It enables developers to consolidate search and analytics workloads into a single database using standard SQL without requiring a separate search engine.
- Who founded ParadeDB?
- ParadeDB was founded by Philippe Noël, Ming Ying in 2023.
- Who are ParadeDB's investors?
- ParadeDB's investors include Craft Ventures, Team Ignite Ventures, Y Combinator.
- How much funding has ParadeDB raised?
- ParadeDB has disclosed $12M raised across 1 round.
- Where is ParadeDB headquartered?
- ParadeDB is headquartered in San Francisco, US.