Joe Green (TechForge): Okay, so welcome to David Baruc. Joins us in our little corner of Text North America 2026. Welcome, David.

David Baruc: Thank you, Joe, having me.

Joe Green (TechForge): Now we always start these little chats with a life story. I want to know a bit about you personally. Are you an engineer? Did you grow up in the woods raised by wolves? What’s your story and how did you end up at RavenDB?

David Baruc: Well, my story is actually I was in the hardware side of the business in the industry. I’ve been for the past 26, 27 years been doing business. I started my career in logistics and then moved to sales. But years ago, like seven years ago, I decided that I needed to move to software and started in software. And four years ago I had the opportunity to join RivenDB, which is a great company, honestly a great place to be. And I had the possibility to grow that company to a certain level today where it is today. We are privately held so we don’t talk about numbers, but let’s say that we’ve been growing over here very, very nicely.

Joe Green (TechForge): Okay, that’s good. And so there’s no VC funding behind the company or…

David Baruc: Nothing. We are completely bootstrapped.

Joe Green (TechForge): And the company, as far as I understand it, and I’m not a developer nor a DBA by any definition, but you’ve grown out of the developer community. These are the people who wear Iron Maiden T-shirts and they spend a lot of time indoors writing code. These are your people, or at least these were your people, weren’t they?

David Baruc: And they’re still our people. By the end of the day, we are working with a lot of developers around the world, but we also work with enterprise. We have, I would say, the blessing of being working with over 50 industries in the world. Almost everybody today use a RavenDB instance, which is amazing. And now by the end of the day, we’re talking about customers like Toyota…

Joe Green (TechForge): A tiny little company!

David Baruc: A tiny little company that I can name! We’re talking about e-commerce, Rakuten Kobo, for instance, another one that I can name, but so many others unfortunately I cannot name. And we’re talking about financial services with very big insurances, banks around the world that are using us on many of their solutions. And we’re talking about e-commerce and we are talking about logistics and we’re talking about healthcare.

Joe Green (TechForge): You said that a lot of businesses, most businesses, have got an instance of RavenDB somewhere. Are we talking about the same sort of scale as, every business running MySQL or Postgres, or you’re getting up into being mentioned in the same sentence as these ubiquitous databases?

David Baruc: No, I want to stay humble and say that I don’t believe so, but by the end of the day, the NoSQL market is not the same as the SQL market. SQL is still very, very dominant. And I think it’s going to continue to be very dominant. However, NoSQL, for instance, can help when we’re talking about AI abilities, AI features that people are trying to develop. When you are the sole SQL solution, you are stuck. Now you need to think about two years, a year and a half, a year of development just to upgrade your system and just start thinking what you’re going to do with AI. You can put a revenue on top of that. In two weeks you are actually getting AI abilities suddenly. We state that we can actually complement those solutions.

Joe Green (TechForge): And I know that developers in particular love your product and it’s one of the big selling points in that it’s the database that you don’t have to worry about. You don’t need a team of six people looking after your database for you. So what is it about Raven instances that are so attractive? Let’s begin with the developer community.

David Baruc: I’ll tell you what I’m hearing from the market. You know what? Every time that I meet a developer, they say, “Oh, I use RavenDP. I love it. ” I’m asking why. It’s about the ease of use and it’s about how fast it is responding and it’s about not getting in the way. By the end of the day, databases, I don’t know why, but they all have that common part. They’re usually a pain in the back[side]. I don’t have the magic pill, but we put so much automation in and that’s actually coming back to your previous question. Yes, we’re coming from the developer mindset because our CEO and founder was the consultant himself.

Joe Green (TechForge): Oren [Eini]?

David Baruc: Yeah, this is Oren.

Joe Green (TechForge): I’ve spoken to Oren. He’s one of the sharpest, most scarily intelligent people I think I’ve ever met.

David Baruc: I think it’s really describing really correctly.

David Baruc: And he’s IQ 195, so trust me, It’s a big brain! And what I’m trying to say is that by the end of the day, Oren was just fed up that there is no one database that can do it all. And he had this idea of what should look like a database. He started coding. Two years later there was RavenDB. And since then, for instance, we have abilities like our auto indexing. He keeps saying to me, “Eh, this is all. This is not what the people want. ” Every developer that I’m speaking of, why use RevenDB? ‘Because you guys have automatic indexing. It’s actually removed a lot of the problems that I have.’ So when I’m talking to you about ease of use, by the end of the day, this is what we do. We are helping them to move forward and to be more innovative.

Joe Green (TechForge): Auto indexing – it’s almost sort of regarded as ‘just something we coded a couple of years ago. We’ve moved on since then.’ And yet still, from what I hear from the community anyway- I agree … that it’s at least what gets Raven in through the door; sells the product to the development team, but actually there are other things going on. We were chatting earlier on, David and I. So we’re talking about making developers’ lives easier and you think, “Well, that’s great. I like to treat my dev team nicely.” But obviously there are cost benefits for having a more efficient development team. Plus companies, what? They save money on database staff? Where from the technical point of view do the cost savings start coming through?

David Baruc: I think that I’m going to use the word disruption, but in a positive way of disrupting the current status quo. When you look today at the team, I think that every IT factory in the world has many priorities, one of them, cost of development, time to market, and all of that actually translates into money. So when you can actually reduce the time to market, so you’re also reducing the cost of development because you’re using less lines of code for your solution. But let’s talk as well about the maintenance operational cost that the solution is costing you after that, revenue reductions, all of that. We are super efficient with latency and we are super efficient here, and super efficient there, and really performing. We are talking about auto indexing, but we also do optimisation of indexing based on queries. So a lot of stuff that actually making soft changes in the status quo. And we are disrupting the status for normal databases and we’re making it much cheaper by the end of the day, but also much more reliable.

Joe Green (TechForge): And there is the issue, of course, I mean, it’s the elephant in the room at every tech conference, has been for the last four years, is the ‘AI elephant in the room.’ Now you guys have engineered particular abilities, as I understand it, under the hood that make working with AI less of a headache than it might be. Can you tell us a bit about that? And then just to preempt what David might say, is there’s another kind of user facing AI element, which we can talk about in a moment, but let’s talk about those AI internals first of all.

David Baruc: So we talked a lot about RavenDB in the past few minutes, but one of the things that I really want to state here, RavenDB is a one-stop shop for efficiency, one-stop shop for performance, but as well, the one-stop shop for AI. We have added the AI layer inside of RevenueB where your data is being stored. So not actually having AV planning to go outside to your vector database, we brought the vector database inside of RevenDB. So you have vector abilities inside of RevenDB that can then do gen AI, and we can do RAG pipeline, and we can do an AI agent creator inside of RevenueB. So you are now not starting to make all those crazy integrations in order to achieve AI, and we all know today that it’s mainly 95% of a project, according to Gartner, are not even getting into the table of development, then RevenueB is moving those 95% of risk. That’s again, translating into money, [that of] a very senior developer, that by the end of the day being [a] plumber and we are actually making that very much more easy for them to achieve what they want to achieve; innovation with AI.

Joe Green (TechForge): And what about the user facing AI element? Is that something I say “as simple as” inverted commas, being able to query instances in natural language. Is it as simple as that?

David Baruc: It is even more simple than that. If you look at our vector search, we have a very great example about Italian food and you look at that example and suddenly you’re getting Italian restaurant, Italian recipes, Italian ingredients and this is a vector at the end of the day. This is what you do. We just go and bring everything together. Now it looks like ‘bring me vector of Italian food.’ This is what you are paying for; the code. So yes, we have a natural language. It’s much more simple than any other solution that I have seen at least, or at least, this is the feedback we are getting from the market. We’re getting great traction today from the market about AI [RavenDB’s] abilities. We’re talking about financial services using it. We’re talking about logistic companies, healthcare, [we’re] very heavily into healthcare because of the abilities and security that we have as well. So we are really dominant into those spaces.

Joe Green (TechForge): You mentioned some of the sectors that you are operating in. What about the kind of business size that you’re pitching your message at the moment? Are we talking about mom and pop shops? Are we talking about, I don’t know, the city of San Jose or are we talking about Global Industries, Inc?

David Baruc: So I have been fortunate with RavenDB to talk to anyone. We’re talking about small startup, founders, companies that just want to develop their solution and grow with us and we have customers that have been loyal to us for 15 years and we’re talking about a huge enterprise level. And again, I cannot name them, but one of your favourite restaurants in the world, for instance.

Joe Green (TechForge): Do you not get imposter syndrome? I always find this: ‘But don’t they realise it’s me? The people are important.’

David Baruc: Well, I grew up in the 3D worlds and one of the things that they used to pitch over there, you don’t know that, but since this morning, you actually touched things that have been 3D printed at some point of its AI cycle. You don’t know that, but you’re using RavenDB almost every day in the backend of any solution that you are using.

Joe Green (TechForge): So that kind of gives you the confidence when you’re getting into those big meetings?.

David Baruc: Exactly.

Joe Green (TechForge): Yeah. Okay. Right. I always throw this question in, David, to all my guests and they all hate me for it.

David Baruc: I probably will!

Joe Green (TechForge): Okay. In five years time, what’s RavenDB going to be doing and where are you going to be?

David Baruc: I think I will be in RavenDB. I kind of like it! It’s funny because at the beginning I didn’t know the industry of databases and I was like, “Me here?” Yeah, but I kind of like it and people are super smart. And in five years time from now, RavenDB, I want to hope that we will continue to keep the competitive edge that we have in advance of certain competitors and their abilities, and we will continue to be as innovative as we are.

Joe Green (TechForge): And it sounds like you’re growing fast enough and almost word of mouth, or at least you’re proving your product enough so that you’re not having to turn to the venture capital market or the private investment market. You don’t have to answer this (and these are the questions that people hate). In the next five years, will you be turning to Wall Street and looking for funding, or are you going to keep this unit going expanding organically?

David Baruc: Hopefully not. Hopefully we will keep the unit because we are very agile, the way that the structure of the company is here, which gives us as well customer satisfaction. Because by the end of the day, we have the feedback that I’m getting from a lot of customers, it is our ability to respond to their needs

Joe Green (TechForge): As opposed to shareholders’ needs. Exactly. Right. We’ll leave it there. David Baruch from RavenDP. Thanks ever so much for joining. Thank you.

David Baruc: Thank you for having me too. I appreciate it. Thank you.