PhoenixAI Launches as the Agentic AI Database and Names Rick Underwood President
Formerly known as CelerData, PhoenixAI relaunches as the analytical engine built for autonomous AI agents to query live enterprise data at sub-second latency, at massive scale.
SAN FRANCISCO, May 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- PhoenixAI today launched as the Agentic AI Database, the analytical engine designed for AI agents to query live enterprise data at sub-second latency and massive concurrency. The company also named Rick Underwood as President to lead its next phase of growth and customer delivery.
The relaunch reflects a fundamental shift in how enterprise data gets consumed. AI agents are increasingly the dominant workload on enterprise data, and they query differently than human analysts: thousands of concurrent agents, sub-second latency requirements, and a need for live data unified with historical context that traditional analytical databases were never designed to serve.
Existing columnar databases built for ad-hoc human analysis weren't designed for managing agent workloads either — they push complexity back to the user at exactly the moment AI agents need the database to absorb it.
"Most of today's analytical databases were architected for a world that no longer exists, where humans ran dashboards on flat tables and complexity was someone else's problem," said Rick Underwood, President of PhoenixAI. "When thousands of agents need to query, reason, and act on petabytes of live data simultaneously — any question, simple or complex — the database is either the bottleneck or the breakthrough. PhoenixAI is built to provide the breakthrough that agentic AI needs, not the bottleneck it can't afford."
Underwood joins PhoenixAI as President, leading go-to-market, customer success, finance, and operations. He was most recently CEO of Clumio, which he took through an acquisition by Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT). Prior to that, he held senior GTM leadership positions at Snowflake from 2017 through the company's record 2020 IPO, and earlier served as Head of Sales and CRO at Wavefront (acquired by VMware, 2017) and Semmle (acquired by Microsoft, 2019). He has spent his career building enterprise technology companies from early traction through exit.
PhoenixAI is built around three deciding factors for any enterprise putting AI agents into production: speed, simplicity, and governance. Speed means sub-second latency and high concurrency on live data, so agents act on what's true now, not yesterday's snapshot. Simplicity means a unified engine for real-time and historical data, eliminating brittle pipelines and reducing total cost of ownership. Governance means built-in data sovereignty, role-based access control, SOC 2 standards, and encryption, deployed in the customer's own cloud (BYOC) or self-hosted with PhoenixAI Anywhere.
PhoenixAI is available today as a BYOC deployment in the customer's own cloud and as a self-hosted option with PhoenixAI Anywhere. Learn more at phoenixdata.ai.
About PhoenixAI
PhoenixAI is the Agentic AI Database, designed to give autonomous AI agents sub-second access to live enterprise data at massive scale. The AI-native engine unifies real-time and historical data, combining the speed and concurrency that agentic workloads demand with the governance and deployment flexibility enterprises require to put AI into production. Formerly known as CelerData, PhoenixAI is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Learn more at: phoenixdata.ai.
PhoenixAI
Joe Bresler
VP of Marketing
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David Wamsley
Rosebud Communications
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SOURCE PhoenixAI
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