Philipp Fent is Co-Founder and Chief Architect at CedarDB, a Munich-based database startup building a unified, PostgreSQL-compatible system for transactional, analytical, and graph workloads in the AI era.

Philipp earned both his Master's degree in Computer Science and his PhD in Database Systems from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where he spent over five years researching cutting-edge database technology as part of the Umbra project.

As the architect behind CedarDB's query optimizer and compiling execution engine, Philipp brings deep expertise in performance optimization, code generation, and modern hardware-aware database design.

Prior to co-founding CedarDB in 2024, Philipp published extensively at top venues including VLDB and SIGMOD, earning a Best Paper Award at DaMoN'24 for his work on hash tables for join processing.

CedarDB, a TUM spinout co-founded by five Umbra researchers, has raised approximately $6M in seed funding led by Amplify Partners, and is serving customers with a growing team of 14-17 people while expanding into the US market.