It’s an open source venture backed by $35M from FirstMark Capital, Spark Capital, and GV (Google Ventures). It’s a drop-in replacement for MySQL with an extension architecture. See their native UUID extension with efficient 16-byte storage as an example.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see multiple MySQL forks emerge in 2026, now that more people are realizing how bad Oracle has been as an open source project steward for MySQL.
In my mind when I see MySQL somewhere it actually means MariaDB. It’s also the default in Debian. Probably in other distributions as well. Or maybe Percona.