“Whatever it takes” represents a historical sentence pronounced by Mario Draghi several years ago that profoundly changed Europe.
I founded SQLite Cloud in 2021, almost 9 years after that iconic speech, but as an Italian, that sentence profoundly changed me and not only my Country. In the following two years, with just a team of two people, we built the company's foundation, thanks also to two top-tier VCs who believed in our mission. So far, we have raised $5.1M and grown into a global team of 10 exceptional individuals spanning the US, Italy, and Mexico.
Some recent personal events made me reflect more profoundly on the past year, and I found that our innovation rate decreased significantly. When you are busy managing and developing all day, it is easy to get lost in so many tasks that you lose the most crucial objective of your company’s mission: innovation.
As a startup, we need to build a solid foundation, develop an efficient architecture, and manage required features and nice-to-have additions. However, our purpose is much more than to be the top-notch SQLite DBMS reference. Our purpose is to redefine the rules and bring genuine innovation to one of the most competitive tech markets.
Today, SQLite Cloud powers thousands of globally distributed nodes within a highly efficient Kubernetes architecture. Raft ensures strong consistency, enabling us to manage countless SQLite databases with many cool features. But I had to ask myself: is this innovation?
For me, “whatever it takes” means having the courage to surrender to preconceptions and what everyone else is doing. It means taking a path that has not yet been traveled and, above all, having the courage to build today what will be used all over the world tomorrow. This is the real purpose of a startup.
I am old enough to remember the dot-com bubble. Although it was a tumultuous period for many companies, the World changed profoundly, and it has never been the same. The same hype is happening with AI, and I am sure that many companies will disappear in a few years. But man, the World will never be the same!
I see a not-too-distant future where small embeddable AI models will be so powerful and efficient that they can run on your devices, use your personal data, and provide a privacy-first experience. All this with zero latency and without the need to rent cloud-based models. I see a future where your local SQLite database will be the central repository for your data, your central repository for your local intelligence, and where all the peers connected to that repository can share their own slice of intelligence, contributing to increasing the overall intelligence of your private cluster, all by respecting privacy, personal information and with zero-latency.
The good news is that we already have all this technology, and we’ll soon make important announcements about it. Someone much wiser than me once said: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.“. That’s exactly what we are doing: welcome sqlite.ai.
