Neon
Serverless Postgres — separated storage and compute, scale-to-zero, instant branching like git ("copy the prod database for your CI run").
Founded in 2021 by ex-Postgres committers. The storage layer writes WAL to object storage and reconstructs pages on demand → branching is copy-on-write over storage snapshots, ready in seconds regardless of size. Compute is regular Postgres processes spawned on demand.
Acquired by Databricks in 2025. Competitors: Supabase (also Postgres but not separated storage/compute), PlanetScale (MySQL), Turso (libSQL/SQLite).