The Story of Meroxa: Building the Future of Data Engineering

Some entrepreneurs know from an early age they’ll build a company. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, DeVaris Brown, CEO of Meroxa, shared how his entrepreneurial journey began on Chicago’s South Side, shaped by family examples and early exposure to the tech industry.

Early Seeds of Entrepreneurship

While many founders discover their calling later in life, DeVaris’s path was different. “It’s going to sound kind of weird, but yes, I did think that I was going to be an entrepreneur,” he recalls. His inspiration came from watching his grandparents break barriers – his grandfather, facing discrimination at US Steel, started his own company, while his grandmother ran her own storefront as an artisan.

But it was the first dot-com boom that truly captured his imagination. “My mom actually got a job in the first dot-com boom. So when I was like 13-14, I saw back then in 97, 96 and 97, it was just the wild west. And I was seeing teenagers come up with ideas and being millionaires.”

This early exposure to tech entrepreneurship led to action. DeVaris wrote a business plan as a teenager – one his mother later revealed she had preserved: “When I started Meroxa and we got funded and all of that, my mom found that I didn’t know she had kept it, but she laminated it for me and she was like, you always had it in you.”

Building Meroxa

After building his career at companies like Microsoft, Twitter, and Heroku, DeVaris launched Meroxa with a clear vision. The company helps organizations move data between systems using code, addressing a fundamental challenge in the modern data landscape.

As DeVaris explains: “Very simply, we help people move data from one place to the other with code. And the reason why that’s super important is that currently, to move data, you have to have a bunch of these different systems that you have to kind of Frankenstein together.”

The timing was challenging – Meroxa launched just as the pandemic began. However, DeVaris found unexpected benefits in the constraints: “For us, we benefited because everybody was at the same spot. It gave us a point where we can just focus and concentrate without a whole bunch of noise.”

Finding Their Market

While many startups chase enterprise deals, Meroxa found success in an unexpected place – government contracts. Starting with the Air Force and Space Force, they eventually landed NASA as a customer. Their approach was straightforward: “We’ve just shown time and time again that we can handle very complex, esoteric data formats and things and do it in real time and get it into formats that machines and humans can leverage to go do their job.”

This success in government contracts has shaped their growth strategy. DeVaris projects that in a few years, Meroxa’s revenue will be “60% to 70% government, 30% to 40% commercial.”

The Future of Real-Time Data

Looking ahead, DeVaris sees Meroxa playing a crucial role in an increasingly real-time world. “This world is going to get increasingly more and more real time, right? Like, you want to get an Uber, do you want to wait ten minutes to find a driver? When you sit down for the weekend and you want to watch some Netflix? Do you want to wait ten minutes to get a recommendation? Absolutely not.”

The company’s vision is to make moving data easier, enabling more personalized applications and experiences driven by real-time data. As consumer expectations for instantaneous, personalized experiences continue to rise, Meroxa is positioning itself to be the infrastructure that makes this possible.

For DeVaris, success means “there’s going to be a lot more personalized applications and experiences driven by real-time data.” In an era where data moves at unprecedented speeds and scales, Meroxa is building the foundation for the next generation of real-time applications.