---
title: Enes Akar
description: Co-founder and CEO of Upstash; serverless Redis, Kafka, and vector database platform
category: People
---

# Enes Akar

![Enes Akar](https://github.com/enesakar.png)

**Enes Akar** is a Turkish-American software engineer and entrepreneur. He is the **Co-founder and CEO of [Upstash](https://upstash.com)**, a serverless data platform offering Redis, Kafka, QStash, and Vector databases optimised for edge and serverless environments. He is active on X as [@enesakar](https://x.com/enesakar) and also co-founded **Context7.ai**.

## Career

Akar holds a BS in Computer Engineering and an MBA from **Boğaziçi University** (Istanbul, Turkey). Prior to Upstash, he was **CTO of Hazelcast Cloud** and worked at **Confluent**, the Kafka-as-a-service company.

He co-founded **Upstash** in 2021, building it into the leading serverless-first data platform for edge runtimes (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel Edge, Deno Deploy). Upstash raised **$10M from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)** and is known for its HTTP-first API design that works natively without persistent connections — critical for serverless functions.

Upstash's product suite includes:
- **Upstash Redis** — serverless Redis with per-request pricing
- **QStash** — serverless message queue / task scheduling
- **Upstash Vector** — serverless vector database for AI embeddings

In 2025–2026, Akar also co-founded **Context7.ai**, a context-layer tool for AI applications.

## Connection to Jan

Upstash began **sponsoring Jan's [[uithub]] project at $100/month** in May 2025 — Jan's first formal sponsorship. The Upstash sponsorship represented the first proof-of-concept for the [[sponsorflare]] monetisation model.

## See Also

- [[Jan_Wilmake]]
- [[uithub]]
- [[sponsorflare]]