Dor Laor, Israeli-born entrepreneur and systems engineer, is on a mission to redefine database performance at scale. As the Co-Founder and CEO of ScyllaDB, Laor leads one of the most powerful NoSQL engines in production today, a drop-in Cassandra alternative that combines blazingly fast performance with massive horizontal scalability.
With over 400 enterprise users including Discord, Epic Games, and Palo Alto Networks, ScyllaDB is gaining traction in a world where data velocity is critical to innovation.
A Database Built for the Data Deluge
Laor’s vision for ScyllaDB emerged in 2012: to create a database as fast and efficient as Redis, but scalable like Cassandra. The result? A C++-built, shard-per-core NoSQL database with single-digit millisecond latencies, built for cloud-native architectures and real-time workloads.
His latest product launch, X Cloud, pushes that vision further, offering elastic scaling, automatic compression, and zero-downtime upgrades. It’s a platform designed to support AI and machine learning deployments without the infrastructure headaches.
From Kernel Engineering to Startup Leadership
Before ScyllaDB, Laor made his mark in systems virtualization. He was a founding engineer at Qumranet, where he helped pioneer KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), a breakthrough later acquired by Red Hat. He then led Red Hat’s KVM efforts as Senior Manager from 2008 to 2012.
This deep background in performance engineering and distributed systems laid the foundation for what would become one of the fastest-growing infrastructure startups in the data space.
Scaling ScyllaDB’s Impact
In October 2023, Laor announced a $43 million Series C round to support ScyllaDB’s growth, bringing total funding to over $100 million. The raise coincided with an 800% increase in revenue since launch and a growing team of engineers, now over 160 strong.
ScyllaDB’s appeal lies in its hybrid deployment flexibility, it runs equally well in cloud, edge, and on-prem environments, making it ideal for fintechs, game developers, cybersecurity firms, and retailers managing massive real-time data flows.
A Voice in the Performance Engineering World
Laor isn’t just a technical CEO, he’s a thought leader in high-scale data architecture. With nearly 10,000 followers on LinkedIn, he shares insights on database design, ScyllaDB use cases, and engineering culture. He’s also a fixture at top-tier tech conferences including P99 CONF, Monster Scale Summit, and Techstrong TV, where he speaks on concurrency control and high-throughput architecture.
One standout moment came during the Monster Scale 2025 Summit, where he unveiled ScyllaDB’s roadmap for “predictive elasticity” and hinted at deeper integrations with AI data pipelines.
Why Dor Laor Matters
Dor Laor is shaping the database layer for the AI era. His work on ScyllaDB reflects a sharp understanding of how infrastructure must evolve to support today’s most demanding workloads, whether it’s real-time gaming events, predictive cybersecurity algorithms, or globally distributed applications.
In a world where speed, resilience, and scale are table stakes, Laor has built more than a high-performance database, he’s built a movement around developer-first, performance-obsessed data infrastructure.
