Kannan Muthukkaruppan

Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at YugabyteDB

Speaker

Kannan Muthukkaruppan is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Yugabyte, the company behind YugabyteDB, a high-performance distributed SQL database for cloud-native applications. With over two decades of experience in databases, large-scale storage systems, language runtimes, and compilers, Kannan has played a pivotal role in shaping the infrastructure powering some of the world’s largest internet services. He began his career working deep in the internals of Oracle’s database engine. As an early employee at Facebook, he led the company’s NoSQL initiatives and was instrumental in scaling and hardening technologies like HBase and Cassandra to support critical workloads, including Facebook Messenger and the Operational Data Store. Following his time at Facebook, he helped drive the development of Nutanix’s distributed and hybrid cloud data fabric before co-founding Yugabyte in 2016 with two fellow ex-Facebook engineers. Kannan holds an M.S. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he was awarded the prestigious UC Regents Fellowship, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science from IIT Madras, where he received the President’s Gold Medal for best academic performance across all disciplines.