The need for time series data is now greater than awareness!

Michael Freedman

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Updated: November 19th, 2023

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On November 1, 2018, Ajay Kulkarni and Michael J. Freedman launched Timescale in response to their requirement for a database solution to serve IoT(internet of things) workloads.

Timescale is an open-source time-series database that is completely compatible with PostgresSQL and is specially built for simplicity of use and for solving complicated queries. TimescaleDB provides SQL methods and table structures to facilitate time series data storage, performance, and analysis for data-at-scale.

Ajay, co-founder & CEO, graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. in Computer Science and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is enthusiastic about entrepreneurship. His prior firms include Sensobi, GroupMe, and TechStars, among others.

Michael, apart from being a founding partner in the company also looks after CTO responsibilities. He got his Ph.D. in computer science from NYU's Courant Institute, as well as his S.B. and M.Eng. degrees from MIT, before joining Princeton in 2007.

He has a long background in the distribution system, storage system, and databases which eventually helped him build this time series database cloud. Apart from being a SaaS founder Michael is also a professor of computer science at the Princeton university and has been a faculty there for over 15 years. In 2021, he was designated the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science.

The company has been successfully running for 4+ years now. In the previous 12 months, the firm has raised $180 million at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Tiger Global, Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Redpoint Ventures, Icon Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, and other renowned investors have invested in it.

Today, the firm serves over 500 paying clients and tens of thousands of additional enterprises in the community that uses TimescaleDB, including Akamai, Cisco WebEx, DigitalOcean, IBM, Microsoft, Pfizer, Samsung, Uber, Walmart, and others.

Key Facts about the company:

Mike always wanted to build things that people use. His interests and early career life would become the kernel of the time scale.
Timescale focuses on developers and businesses working with machine data and IoT.
The company is a remote-first enterprise with a global workforce.
TimescaleDB is offered as open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license.
Its performance characteristics have been compared to InfluxDB.
Timescale has seen 7x community growth and 20x revenue growth.