We're building the boring backend for apps and agents<br>We're launching Compute, Object Storage, and AI Gateway to run alongside Database and Auth. Learn more and register for early access here.

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Back to Blog/Product<br>We're building the boring backend for apps and agents<br>Why Neon is expanding beyond Postgres into a branchable stack of backend primitives — auth, data API, object storage, compute, and an AI gateway — for the agentic era.<br>Bryan Clark–VP Product

May 28, 2026

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Everyone has been talking about throwing it all away and building entirely new magic sci-fi cloud infrastructure for agents.

Amidst all the hype, this tweet stood out to me as a voice of reason:

"The agent-native cloud needs boring primitives more than magic. Identity, permissions, logs, rollback, and cost controls before the sci-fi layer."<br>@rtheoryxyz

Building real infrastructure is hard enough as it is. AI has only raised the stakes, dialing up the operational requirements and pushing the limits in new and unexpected ways. When autonomous agents or developers move at breakneck speeds, applications break. "Magic" won’t help you recover when a runaway agent deletes your production database and all its backups. Robust, familiar infrastructure with rollbacks, AI-friendly APIs and higher operational capacity is the way forward.

The Hard Requirements of the AI Era

When we founded Neon four years ago, the core principles laid out in our Hello World post were aimed at helping human developers move faster. As luck would have it, the AI era has shifted those exact principles into the "hard requirements" column:

Low entry cost: When code generation is free and instant, even a $5 upfront infrastructure cost is a non-starter.

Branching: Code has always had isolated environments, but the data stack lacked them. This created a massive gap in the ability to experiment safely.

Serverless: Infrastructure should live automatically in the background, scaling instantly to meet shifting usage demands. A backend shouldn't be t-shirt sized; it should precisely match what the application demands of it.

Human developers make mistakes (cue the Matrix meme: "Only human"). But AI coding agents make mistakes at a blistering, automated velocity that traditional infrastructure simply wasn't designed to handle. Without strict guardrails, agents will tear down systems just as quickly as they build them.

An Agentic Stack Built by Systems Engineers

Neon's serverless Postgres branching changed how developers work by ensuring every single database change could be validated in an isolated environment. At this point, we start tens of millions of branches every day.<br>Now, we’re taking the same copy-on-write, instant branching approach and applying it to the full suite of backend primitives today's agent stack requires.

The Complete Agent-Native Backend

Postgres Database — ✅ Available

Authentication — ✅ Available

Data API — ✅ Available

Object Storage — 🔜 Coming Soon

Compute — 🔜 Coming Soon

AI Gateway — 🔜 Coming Soon

Access

We are launching a private beta soon. Sign up for updates and access here:

Get early access to the Neon backend platform<br>We're expanding Neon into a complete backend platform. Drop your email and we'll reach out soon for early access.<br>Get access

Scaling with Enterprise Muscle

One year after joining Databricks, the benefits are showing on both sides. Lakebase, the same technology as Neon on Databricks, is the fastest-growing new offering in Databricks history. In turn, being part of a larger company has helped us grow our database team with world-class engineers, improve platform performance, lower costs, and now ship mature, battle-tested products to developers on Neon:

The AI Gateway for example already handles more than 125 trillion tokens a month, hardened by rigorous enterprise requirements for day-0 model coverage, high availability, deep metrics, logging, and granular cost controls.

To be clear: We are not shifting focus away from our core database product. Postgres remains the bedrock for everything we do. The Neon team has aggressively expanded within Databricks, and we've hired top-tier, senior engineering talent from other major database services. We are expanding our platform by building entirely new, dedicated teams while simultaneously growing our core Postgres engineering powerhouse.

We're building the boring infrastructure layer. Go build sci-fi.

FAQ

Does this mean you're focusing less on database?

No. The same storage and compute technology powers both Neon Serverless Postgres and Databricks Lakebase, so every improvement to the core engine benefits both products. Lakebase serves large enterprise customers; Neon serves startups, agent platforms and individual developers. Both are growing, and that growth funds a bigger systems engineering team, not a smaller one.Today, around 120 engineers work...