About Us
For decades, building scalable software applications has been extremely expensive, requiring the combination of dozens of different tools. The engineering involved countless arcane tasks that were far removed from actual application logic. The narrow focus of each individual tool, and the lack of a cohesive model for building applications, caused the engineering cost to be orders of magnitude greater than it could be.
Red Planet Labs was founded in 2013 to find a way to radically reduce the cost of building software applications. After 10 years, that effort resulted in Rama, a new kind of software tool capable of building end-to-end, scalable backends in a tiny fraction of the cost previously required. It's not just for the initial construction of an application, but also encapsulates deployment, monitoring, and maintenance.
Team
NATHAN MARZ
Nathan is the founder of Red Planet Labs. Prior to RPL, he led engineering for BackType which was acquired by Twitter in 2011. Nathan created the Apache Storm project and wrote the book Big Data: Principles and best practices of scalable realtime data systems. Outside of working, Nathan is a private pilot, loves going to stand-up comedy shows, and is forever trying to teach his dog new tricks.
HUGO DUNCAN
Hugo is a founding engineer at Red Planet Labs. Hugo previously was a founding engineer at the telemedicine startup Dialogue, and prior to that in startups spanning the marine, finance, and arts worlds. He also created the open source Pallet infrastructure automation project. When not playing soccer coach for his kids, Hugo enjoys MMA and cross country skiing.
SAM ADAMS
Sam is a founding engineer at Red Planet Labs. He was previously a full stack developer at Amazon where he built web applications for AWS FinTech. On the weekends you'll find him picking guitar, hacking up a golf course, or occasionally scuba diving.
SUNIL SEKAR
Sunil has worked as a senior engineer in the health, publishing, and governance domains. He enjoys reading biographies, science, and philosophy, and meticulously collects music from various genres.
THOMAS MORRISS
Before joining Red Planet Labs, Tommy worked with brain data at a medical devices company, and as a web backend developer at Amazon. In his free time he likes social consensus software, running video game 1v1 tournaments, and taking very long walks.
BIUBIU
Biubiu is the CFO of Red Planet Labs (Chief Food Officer). Biubiu applies his eating, sleeping, and cuddling expertise towards building highly scalable systems from the ground up. Prior to RPL, Biubiu founded the political advocacy organization "More Treats Now!", but he was convinced to stop his advocacy for a single dog biscuit. He's upset that computer bugs aren't edible.
Advisors
MIKE CVET
Mike Cvet is a Distinguished Engineer at LinkedIn, focused on product engineering velocity. Previously he spent nearly a decade at Twitter, working amongst many of its largest platform services while helping steward the company’s culture, processes and architecture. He was the Group Tech Lead for Twitter's Core Services organization, a group of teams responsible for the serving and storage of Twitter’s key business primitives – Tweets, Users, Graphs, Search, Timelines, and more - along with the developer platforms supporting product development upon those primitives.
MICHAEL MONTANO
Michael Montano is a founder, engineering leader, investor and advisor. He previously founded BackType, acquired by Twitter in 2011 for its analytics product and technology.
At Twitter, Michael led teams across the platform, advertiser products and consumer organization. From 2018 through 2021, Michael served as the Head of Global Engineering. During that time Twitter’s usage and revenue grew nearly 2x, supported by the Engineering team’s focus on reliability, scaling, moving significant workloads to the cloud and a continued investment in machine learning.
Investors
“At Initialized the most important factor in our investments is the founder. Nathan has deeply impressed us as one of the strongest technology pioneers whose systems have saved tech giants hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure costs. Red Planet Labs is poised to solve fundamental infrastructure problems, and in the process build a significant and enduring business.”
"The biggest breakthroughs come from building on first principles. This is why Red Planet Labs is the largest single investment I've made in years."
"Building large-scale applications today is complicated and expensive. Red Planet Labs has the potential to change that with its simple, all-encompassing system."
"While people, businesses, and markets have increasingly digitized and benefited from moving online, the underlying development and operation of larger scale applications has increased in complexity and cost. We’re very excited about how Red Planet Labs's technology will change the fundamental economics of building unified software infrastructure in virtually any industry."
"The market opportunity for Red Planet Labs is immense. Almost every company dealing with large scale infrastructure will benefit in a big way from Red Planet Labs' breakthroughs."
"Infrastructure development today is too complicated, too ad-hoc, and too costly. Red Planet Labs has the strong potential to elegantly solve all of these big challenges in one platform."