Basho Technologies
The company behind Riak, a distributed key-value database built straight on Amazon's Dynamo paper — the whole point was never going down.
Founded in 2008 and named after the haiku poet. Its product, Riak, written in Erlang, was one of the cleanest readings of Amazon's Dynamo model: no master node, consistent hashing, tunable replication and the ability to answer even when half the cluster is on fire. The price was eventual consistency — two reads a moment apart could return different answers.
Basho also sold Riak CS (object storage) and Riak TS (time series) but never turned technical respect into a business. The company went bankrupt in 2017; the source was opened and has been carried on by the community since. A textbook case of a database people admired more than they paid for.