We’re excited to introduce our newest Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR), Carl Sverre, and our pre-seed investment in his stealth company. Carl embodies everything we look for in a founder. He is a domain-expert at the top of his field who has a strong vision for what the future of computing should look like.

I first met Carl Sverre after watching his incredible talk at KubeCon 2021. Carl discussed pushing WebAssembly modules into the database, and this was one of the most radical new concepts I’d seen. Carl’s vision would enable compute modules to sit right next to the data and enable data transformations within the database itself. But beyond the big vision, Carl was an inspirational speaker, and the energy from his talk was palpable. Over the past 18 months, we’ve gotten to know Carl better, and we believe the vision for his company is exceptional. 

We share Carl’s excitement for several of the same trends. Like Carl, we believe that state management will be one of the biggest challenges over the next decade. We believe that more data will move to the edge, and we believe data should be able to move from one location to another in real-time – unlocked from cloud providers –while maintaining correctness and keeping costs low. Finally, we believe that data movement shouldn't be limited by a network connection, and everything should work in an “offline-first” context.

Prior to joining us, Carl spent a decade at SingleStore (fka as MemSQL) as one of their earliest engineers. Carl wore many hats at SingleStore from Director of Engineering to Senior Director of SingleStore’s informal “incubation lab” for the most cutting-edge database work. If there is anybody who understands how to build and scale data and streaming systems, it’s Carl.  

Every person who knows Carl said the same things about him – he’s technically gifted, highly creative, rigorously focused, and just a fantastic leader, manager, and colleague. If Carl hadn’t started a company, many of our portfolio companies wanted to hire him in their C-Suite. Carl also has a unique knack for networking the very best people together. (You should ask him about the two Discord Channels he already runs – one for engineers in Vancouver and the other for Canadian founders.) We have no doubt that Carl’s network will serve him well in hiring the best talent and building a vibrant developer community. 

We believe that Carl will be a key member of Amplify’s founder community of technical leaders focused on open-source, developer tools, data infrastructure, and machine learning. In particular, we believe that Carl can help us deepen our connections in the Rust community, as we believe Rust will take over distributed systems, gain share in data infrastructure, and speed up parts of the JavaScript and Python ecosystems. 

We are incredibly excited for Carl to join Amplify Partners, and please join me in welcoming him! You can find Carl on Twitter (@carlsverre) to stay up-to-date on his work.