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- Enes Akar
- Guillaume Lebedel
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Enes Akar
Enes Akar
Enes Akar is a Turkish-American software engineer and entrepreneur. 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.
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.