PgDog raises $5.5M to make Postgres horizontally scalable via proxy

PgDog, a three-person startup building an open-source sharding proxy for Postgres, has raised $5.5M from Basis Set, Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, and others. The pitch: Postgres’s main weakness is horizontal scaling, and databases like MongoDB and DynamoDB largely exist to fill that gap. PgDog sits in front of unmodified Postgres as a proxy — users pull a Docker image, swap their DATABASE_URL, and get sharding without touching the database itself.

The project already claims meaningful production traction: over 2M queries per second across dozens of deployments, more than 20TB of sharded data, and 1.4M+ Docker pulls. It ships weekly releases and runs anywhere — cloud, on-prem, colo, or laptop — with no external dependencies, a deliberate contrast to serverless database offerings with usage-based pricing.

Founder Lev’s credibility rests on having scaled Postgres at Instacart during its 5x COVID-era growth surge in April 2020, sharding across RDS, Aurora, and EC2. The funding will support continued open-source development plus an Enterprise edition aimed at AWS deployments with SLA-backed support. The bet is that Postgres adoption keeps growing and that solving its scaling story removes the last reason to reach for NoSQL alternatives.