Company: SurrealDB
Co-founders, CEO (Tobie), and COO (Jaime): Tobie Morgan Hitchcock, Jaime Morgan Hitchcock
Website: https://surrealdb.com/
About SurrealDB
SurrealDB has created something completely unique: the first, truly AI-native, multi-model database. Founded by brothers Tobie and Jaime Morgan Hitchcock, this VC-backed ($20 million to-date), Oxford-born startup is the fastest-growing open source database of all time, according to Github stats.
Most companies have many databases for different things: MySQL and PostgreSQL for transactional data, MongoDB and Couchbase for document storage etc. SurrealDB is a relational database, a key value store, a document database, and a graph database combined in one.
More importantly, SurrealDB provides Agentic Memory – the persistent context and reasoning layer – for modern apps and autonomous agents. It unites document, graph, relational and vector data with built-in inference, running seamlessly from cloud to edge.
The interest shown by developers has been immediate and dramatic: SurrealDB became the fastest-growing database in history, amassing 10,000 stars on Github in 4 weeks. It has now reached just over 30,000, and over 2.1 million downloads. SurrealDB is being used by companies in a host of sectors including Vodafone, Verizon, Samsung Ads, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Tencent uses SurrealDB for infrastructure monitoring and has consolidated nine database tools into one, something that was impossible.
Tobie’s experience working on varied SaaS products is where his vision for a brand new database came to life. “We were working on a complicated graph/analytics/visualisation platform for golf-course analytics, using multiple databases (Influxdb, OrientDB, DynamoDB, MySQL) and a complicated API layer sitting inside CoreOS. We thought that there had to be a better system, but there wasn’t. So, we decided to make one, and SurrealDB was conceived. Amongst other things, we separated the storage from the compute, which enabled us to run SurrealDB as an embedded database, but also as a cloud database where you can query and distribute your data in many different ways, and scale as you need to.”
Saks Fifth Avenue
Luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue, has 5 million active customers and processes 45 million recommendation queries monthly. With SurrealDB, Saks saw a 167% increase in conversion rates, and a boost of 30% in customer retention.
Saks was looking for dynamic pricing, live inventory, and Al-driven recommendations in milliseconds. In particular, they looked for real-time personalisation at scale. Historically, customer preferences, purchase history, browsing patterns, and product relationships had been spread across siloed systems, making unified analysis impossible.
Consolidation of customer data from multiple touchpoints into a single, scalable platform eliminated data silos and enabled comprehensive customer insights. The integration of LLMs with SurrealDB’s vector capabilities delivered contextually aware, personalised product recommendations that adapted to customer behaviour in real-time.
Samsung Ads
Samsung Ads experienced issues as a result of siloed customer profiles and behaviour data stored in siloed systems, and an inability to segment audiences effectively resulting in a high ad spend with suboptimal returns.
With SurrealDB, they achieved a 25% ROI in their precise audience targeting, saving millions in annual ad spend, and cut operational costs by 30% by eliminating the need for multiple analytics platforms.
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