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Enes Akar
Enes Akar
Enes Akar is a Turkish-American software engineer and entrepreneur based in San Jose / Palo Alto, California. He is the Co-founder and CEO of Upstash, a serverless data platform offering Redis, Kafka, QStash, and Vector databases optimised for edge and serverless environments. He is active on X as @enesakar and also co-founded Context7.ai.[1]
Career
Akar holds a BS in Computer Engineering and an MBA from Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey). He has 10+ years of experience in distributed systems. Prior to Upstash, he was CTO of Hazelcast Cloud (August 2018 – October 2020) and worked at Confluent, the Kafka-as-a-service company.[2]
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.[3]
Upstash's product suite includes:
- Upstash Redis — serverless Redis with per-request pricing
- Upstash Kafka — deprecated 2025 in favour of Upstash Workflow
- 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, making it Jan's first formal sponsorship. Enes expressed interest in a potential Cloudflare-specific framework Jan was building (likely a Cloudflare Workers + Upstash integration pattern). Jan met with Enes in person in Groningen on a Friday evening in May 2025 to discuss the collaboration and explore deeper sponsorship potential.[4]