Company Values
Materialize empowers organizations to act confidently on fast-changing data.
Values
- Delight our Customers
- We measure our own success by the success of our customers, and celebrate when our customers’ ambitious goals are achieved. Doing this means paying attention to the root of our customers’ most challenging problems and solving them in a way that leaves them both surprised and delighted.
- Own the Outcome
- Actively own the success of the projects you’re working on with the teams you’re working with. Proactively identify potential issues that could stall progress. When there is a problem, offer and implement solutions rather than waiting. Be ready to involve and compromise with others to push towards success, but be willing to take calculated risks if they are needed to solve the problem. Loop back around to ensure the right outcome occurs. That being said, if every outcome is a success, it could be a sign we aren’t thinking big enough. When a bet doesn’t pay off, reflect on why so you and your team can continue to improve.
- Earn and Offer Trust
- The world’s leading businesses power their critical business processes with our cloud product, a relationship that requires total trust that we will deliver correctness, availability, and security. We know that we have to earn this trust in every aspect of our customer relationships. From onboarding, to production, to new use cases and beyond, we need to provide our customers with protection, proactiveness, and transparency. We must also offer trust as a default stance to our co-workers, creating a supportive culture that allows people the agency and autonomy necessary to Own the Outcome, including the opportunity to improve by learning when things don’t go according to plan."
- Seek Data, Take Action
- Materialize takes an evidence-based approach to running our business, but we also avoid “analysis paralysis.” We observe and question what is happening, ask deep questions, test, analyze the data, and act on our conclusions. We acknowledge when we don’t have the right data to make a decision, and seek to find the best evidence-based solution with the data that we do have to move forward thoughtfully. As we receive more data, we refine our answers and actions to Own the Outcome.
- Be Candid
- Honesty and candor are central to our culture. This can be emotionally difficult to navigate, but we believe it is worth it for the clarity and shared context it creates. Communicating honestly is hardest when things aren’t going well, but that’s also when it’s most important. Our candor is both internal and external.
Built on Mature Technology
Built on Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow, open source frameworks created by cofounder Frank McSherry at Microsoft Research.
$100 Million Raised
Funded by firms with a track record of success in databases.
Trusted in Production
Data and Engineering Teams at industry-leading companies run production workloads at scale in Materialize.
Try Materialize for Free
Get hands-on with Materialize in a 14-day free trial.
Get to know the Materialize Leadership Team
Jessica Laughlin
Head of Product
Jessica joined Materialize as the fifth engineer, coming from Goldman Sachs and Bluecore. She leads the product organization, focused on shipping features that make Materialize users successful in production.
Charles Horner
VP Finance and Operations
Charles joined Materialize in 2021 to build out finance and operations. He is now VP Finance and Operations. Previously, he was an investor at RRE Ventures working with hundreds of start-ups at varying stages of development and an investment banker at Goldman Sachs working on transactions in the Technology, Media and Telecom sectors. Charles has a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.
Nikhil Benesch
CTO
Nikhil is the Chief Technology Officer at Materialize. He previously worked on the replication engine for CockroachDB. He has an A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard, where he did research on streaming dataflow systems.
Frank McSherry
Chief Scientist
Frank was previously at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley where he co-invented Differential Privacy, and subsequently led the Naiad project. Frank holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Washington.
Arjun Narayan
Co-Founder & Board Member
Arjun cofounded Materialize, coming from database-building experience as an early engineer at Cockroach Labs and through his Ph.D in distributed systems, security, privacy and scalability from the University of Pennsylvania.
Emily Black
Director of Marketing
Emily joined Materialize in 2024, she brings a proven track record in demand generation, campaign strategy, and marketing leadership, with experience driving impactful growth at companies like Starburst and through her creative leadership at Marblehead Little Theatre.
Matt Mhor
Director of Sales
Matt joined Materialize in 2023 as part of the founding sales team, he is now leading the sales organization as Director of Sales. He has spent over a decade in various sales roles for high growth startups including most recently leading the North America commercial sales team at Dremio and part of the pre-IPO sales team at Elastic.
Nate Stewart
CEO
Nate comes to Materialize after 7 years leading the product organization and 4 years serving on the board at Cockroach Labs. While at Cockroach, Nate had previously worked with Materialize co-founders Arjun Narayan and Nikhil Benesch. Previously, Nate was in product roles at Percolate and Microsoft. He has an MBA from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
Seth Wiesman
Director of Field Engineering
Seth Wiesman joined Materialize in 2021 as Director of Field Engineering, focusing on helping users solve their most challenging operational data needs. As a long-time contributor and committer to Apache Flink, Seth brings over a decade of experience in data and streaming technologies, including work on some of the world's largest and most complex data projects.
Backed By The Best
Mature Technology, Long-Term Vision
Materialize builds on frameworks originally developed at Microsoft Research.
Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System Paper published
Materialize cofounder Frank McSherry and his collaborators first share their work on Timely Dataflow, in a paper while working at Microsoft Research.
Timely Dataflow in Rust
Frank begins an open source project on timely dataflow written in Rust, the foundational building block on which Materialize is built.
Company Founded
Materialize founded by Arjun Narayan and Frank McSherry.
Series A
$8.5m Series A from Lightspeed, still in stealth
First Public Release
First public release of Materialize as a source-available single binary, built in Rust.
Series B
Materialize raises $32M Series B from Kleiner Perkins
Series C
Materialize Raises $60M Series C from Redpoint
Cloud Platform
Materialize unbundles the single binary into a cloud-native distributed system to unlock the next phase of scale.
What's Next?
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Built on Strong Principles
Build to last
We build based on a well-researched, long-term vision, and we take the time to build it well.
Be frank
Transparency is central to our culture. We extend transparency to our customers: we show them our code, and give them realistic expectations about what is possible.
Take ownership
We actively own the success of the projects we’re working on and the teams we’re working with.
Default to trust
We put ego aside and give teammates and customers a level of trust that empowers them to take action.
Write things down
We take the time to write things down so that others can understand what we've done and how.
Join Our Team
Help us build the next generation of streaming data tools.
Brand Guidelines
You can find all the different Materialize logos alongside a guide on when to use what and so on our media kit page.