Karthik, co-founder and CTO of Yugabyte, was one of the original database engineers at Facebook responsible for building distributed databases including Cassandra and HBase. He is an Apache HBase committer, and also an early contributor to Cassandra, before it was open-sourced by Facebook. He is currently co-founder and CTO of the company behind YugabyteDB, a fully open-source distributed SQL database for building cloud native and geo-distributed applications.