Turso was founded in 2022 by Glauber Costa, a well-known systems programmer who previously worked on the Linux kernel and ScyllaDB. The company is based in the US and raised $30 million in funding, including a Series A in 2024.
Turso takes a different approach to databases by building on SQLite rather than Postgres or MySQL. They created libSQL, an open-source fork of SQLite that adds features like server mode, replication, and extensions. The result is a database that’s embedded like SQLite but can replicate to multiple edge locations worldwide.
The killer feature is latency. Turso can place read replicas in dozens of locations around the globe, so database reads happen close to your users. For applications where every millisecond of latency counts — think personalized content, user preferences, or session data — this architecture makes a lot of sense.
Turso has found a natural home in the edge computing ecosystem. It integrates well with platforms like Remix, Astro, and various serverless runtimes. The company offers a free tier with up to 500 databases and 9 GB of storage, which is generous enough for side projects and small apps.
The bet on SQLite is interesting because SQLite is already the most deployed database engine in the world — it’s just traditionally been used locally. Turso is essentially asking: what if we could make SQLite work across a distributed network? For many use cases, that question has a very good answer.
