The Story of Timescale: Building the Future of Data-Intensive Computing

Sometimes the most successful companies emerge from solving your own problems. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Timescale CEO Ajay Kulkarni shared how a solution built for internal use transformed into a company reshaping the future of database technology.

From IoT Platform to Database Innovation

The Timescale story begins in 2015, but not as the database company we know today. “We started off building a slightly different company,” Ajay explains. “It was a company in the IoT Space Internet of things.” Having spent the previous decade in mobile technology, the team saw IoT as the next frontier of computing.

Their initial product was a data analysis platform for IoT devices. It achieved moderate success, tracking over 100,000 devices for paying customers. But to power this platform, they needed a reliable database. After trying several off-the-shelf solutions without success, they made a fateful decision: to build their own.

The Pivot Point

By 2016, something interesting started happening during customer conversations. While selling their IoT platform, prospects kept asking detailed questions about the database they’d built. “We’re like, ‘oh, this is solving a much bigger problem than this IoT thing,'” Ajay recalls.

This realization led to their relaunch as Timescale in early 2017. But even then, they didn’t fully grasp the scope of their opportunity. “Initially, we thought it was IoT. Then we thought it was this thing called time series, which is like, IoT and finance tick data, and maybe metrics data,” Ajay shares.

Discovering a Broader Vision

As they grew, Timescale began seeing unexpected use cases emerge: “We saw all these use cases like gaming and music analytics and marketing tech email analytics, and new Internet protocols.” This diversity of applications pointed to a larger trend.

“What we essentially discovered is that as Compute has gotten more powerful and storage has gotten cheaper, developers are just building more applications that capture large amounts of data and make use of it,” Ajay explains. These “data-intensive applications” represented a fundamental shift in how companies were building software.

Building Community Before Revenue

Rather than rushing to monetize, Timescale focused on building a strong developer community. “Everything we built was open source, everything was free,” Ajay notes. The leadership team was heavily involved in community support, with Ajay and his co-founder actively participating in their Slack channel.

This community-first approach has paid off. Today, Timescale serves over 1,000 customers, with a community 50 times larger than their customer base.

The Future of Computing

Looking ahead, Ajay sees Timescale playing a crucial role in reshaping how companies interact with their data. “I think the database needs to be reimagined,” he states. “I think the database in the cloud will look very different.”

The vision extends beyond just building a successful company. “Our mission is to what we say is we want to help build the future of computing and by doing so, build the next great database company,” Ajay explains. This aligns with their observation that “every company today is either a software company or is becoming a software company or is getting replaced by software company.”

For Timescale, success isn’t just about technological innovation – it’s about enabling the next generation of software companies to build better products. As Ajay puts it, “In five years you’ll see Timescale not as a time series company, maybe not even as a database company, but as something really providing a data platform for the future of computing.”