DataStax

Cassandra was written at Facebook and handed to Apache. Jonathan Ellis, one of its most active developers, founded Riptano with Matt Pfeil in 2010 to sell support, and a year later the name became DataStax. The business rested on a commercial distribution with extra tooling and, from 2020, the hosted service Astra DB.

Relations with the Apache community were frosty at times, since a single vendor wrote so much of the code. When generative AI took off, DataStax rebranded itself around vector search and bought the Langflow tool, and suddenly the marketing was more about vector databases than NoSQL. IBM acquired the company in 2025.