The Story of RisingWave Labs: Building the Future of Stream Processing

Not every great business starts with a founder’s clear vision of success. Sometimes, it begins with a problem that won’t let go. For Yingjun Wu, that problem was real-time data processing.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Yingjun shared how his decade-long obsession with stream processing led him from academia to AWS, and eventually to founding RisingWave Labs. “Over the last ten years, my entire life is about stream processing, database systems,” he revealed.

The journey began during his PhD studies at the National University of Singapore, where he first grappled with the complexities of stream processing. But it was his time at AWS Redshift that crystallized the market opportunity. While building one of the world’s leading data warehouses, he noticed a critical limitation: batch processing alone wasn’t enough.

“Think about well, if you have a bank, it runs a query every single night so that you can see the result of yesterday, but you cannot see the result of, let’s say, last five minutes,” Yingjun explained. “So you cannot get a real time insight. So it’s really hard for people to make real time decisions based on real time data.”

This insight led to the founding of RisingWave Labs in early 2021. But rather than following the traditional enterprise software playbook, Yingjun took an engineer’s approach to building the company. The initial team consisted entirely of engineers, focusing on technical excellence over marketing.

“Last year we don’t really have any marketing person and what we have is basically engineers,” he shared. This technical-first approach paid off in unexpected ways. By building their system in Rust, a trending programming language, they attracted significant attention from the developer community.

The results speak for themselves. Within just 28 days, RisingWave Labs achieved over 5,000 deployments globally and established more than 100 long-running clusters. Their GitHub repository garnered approximately 5,000 stars, indicating strong developer interest.

But success brought its own challenges. “Every single people, every single user asking for different things,” Yingjun noted. With limited resources, they had to make tough choices about product direction. Some users wanted specific system integrations, others requested cloud platform support, and each request seemed equally urgent.

The solution came from an unexpected source: Amazon’s customer-obsessed culture. Having worked at AWS, Yingjun was deeply influenced by Jeff Bezos’s philosophy of focusing on customers rather than competitors. This principle helped RisingWave Labs maintain focus amid competing demands.

Looking ahead, Yingjun has a clear vision for RisingWave Labs’ future. “We hope that within the next three to five years when you talk to all customers, our customers should tell you that we are so customer obsessed,” he shared. Rather than chasing trendy technologies, they’re committed to becoming a leading force in stream processing.

“We want to be focused within the next three to five years probably. We are not spin across different domains. We will not do AI and we are not do RAM… We will have focus,” Yingjun emphasized. This dedication to their core mission – making real-time data processing accessible through familiar tools like SQL – sets RisingWave Labs apart in an industry often distracted by the next big thing.

It’s a vision grounded in practical experience and deep technical expertise, but ultimately focused on solving real customer problems. For RisingWave Labs, the future of stream processing isn’t about chasing buzzwords – it’s about making real-time insights accessible to every business that needs them.