The Story of QuestDB: Building the Future of Time Series Data
Every great company starts with a moment of recognition. For QuestDB, that moment came when Nicolas Hourcard discovered his co-founder’s side project – a database that would eventually reshape how companies handle time series data.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Nicolas shared how his journey in finance inadvertently led to the creation of QuestDB. “At Rothschild, which is an investment bank, I was part of a new team, a bit like a startup, essentially very small team within a larger bank. And that team was focused on data and analytics,” Nicolas recalls. “Essentially all the data we’re analyzing was time series data. So that’s where my love for time series started.”
This experience proved crucial when he met his future co-founder in London, who “was building QuestDB on the side sort of passion project.” The connection was immediate, and they saw an opportunity to transform this side project into something bigger.
The Early Struggles
The path wasn’t easy. “The first months were probably the toughest,” Nicolas shares. Despite their technical expertise, they faced skepticism from London-based venture capitalists who wanted to see revenue before taking them seriously. But the team knew that building a robust open-source product required a different approach.
Rather than chase early revenue, they focused on building something exceptional. This decision went against conventional wisdom, but it allowed them to develop a product that could truly compete in a challenging market.
Finding Their Focus
A pivotal moment came when they realized they couldn’t compete by simply matching their competitors’ feature sets. “We were comparing our feature set to those of our competitors, other databases that had been there for a while at all of those features, and it felt like, wow, we have maybe a 10th of those features,” Nicolas remembers.
Instead of trying to catch up, they made a strategic decision to excel in a specific niche. This focus allowed them to build something truly distinctive in the time series database space, positioning themselves between established players like KDB and other open-source alternatives.
The Growth Phase
After getting into Y Combinator, things began to accelerate. Their commitment to technical excellence started paying off, attracting the attention of major enterprises. Today, they’re selling to “pretty large companies, listed companies worth more than $50 billion market caps,” while maintaining their developer-first approach.
Their success has been built on maintaining a delicate balance between open source community building and commercial growth. As Nicolas explains, “If you have a bit too much focus one, then the other starts suffering a little bit and vice versa.”
The Vision Ahead
Looking to the future, QuestDB has ambitious plans. “The shorter term for us would be to become the go to database for storing financial market data and IoT sensor data at a petabyte scale,” Nicolas shares. But their long-term vision is even more expansive.
“We plan to grow our market opportunity massively by essentially supporting more types, arrays, vector embeddings, stuff like that, so that we could be powering virtually any application in Genai and other fields,” Nicolas explains. Their goal is to bring their high-performance capabilities to new use cases “as data explodes and performance requirements also evolve.”
QuestDB’s story is more than just a technical success – it’s a testament to the power of patient building, focused execution, and staying true to a developer-first ethos. As they continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with time series data, their journey offers valuable lessons for founders building deep technology companies in today’s market.