VillageSQL

About VillageSQL

VillageSQL is an open-source tracking fork of MySQL designed to address the database's innovation gap, particularly in the context of AI and agent-based workloads. The company was co-founded by CEO Dominic Preuss and CTO Steve Schirripa. The founding team possesses extensive experience in building databases and storage infrastructure at major tech companies like Google and Amazon. Preuss brings strategic and technical leadership from his time at Google and Amazon, while Schirripa has a 21-year background in engineering leadership at Google, where he was the Tech Lead for critical data systems like Bigtable and Colossus. The broader team includes senior engineers and database experts from Google, AWS, and Oracle, including Tomas Ulin, who previously led MySQL engineering at Oracle.

Launched in February 2026, VillageSQL announced $35 million in funding across Seed and Series A rounds led by FirstMark, GV (Google Ventures), and Spark Capital. The company's core mission is to enable "permissionless innovation" within the MySQL ecosystem. It achieves this by introducing a robust extension framework, allowing developers to add custom data types, functions, and soon, indexes, directly into the database engine without waiting for official updates from a central authority. This model is designed to be more comprehensive than MySQL's existing plugin system and is similar to the extension ecosystems found in projects like PostgreSQL.

VillageSQL positions itself as a drop-in replacement for MySQL, meaning developers can migrate existing databases and use their current tools and object-relational mappers (ORMs) with zero code changes required. The platform is based on MySQL 8.4 and is committed to maintaining compatibility with future versions. The initial alpha release includes extensions for AI prompting via SQL functions, native UUID support, network address types (IPv6 and MAC), cryptographic functions, and complex numbers. The business model centers on providing this open-source database for free under the GPL v2 license, with plans to offer a managed cloud service in the future. The roadmap includes developing support for vector indexing and optimized vector search to cater to the demands of AI-driven applications like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).