Stepan Parunashvili is Co-Founder and CTO of Instant (YC S22), a modern Firebase alternative that gives frontend developers a real-time, relational database without managing backend infrastructure.

Stepan began his career launching a startup in China, then joined Wit.ai as an early engineer working on natural language processing APIs before the company was acquired by Facebook, where he built and patented multiple products.

After four years at Meta, Stepan joined Airbnb as a Staff Engineer on the Payments team, where he experienced firsthand how complex microservices architectures slow developer velocity, inspiring him to build Instant.

Stepan co-founded Instant with former roommate Joe Averbukh, combining 15+ years of combined engineering experience from Facebook and Airbnb to create a graph-based, Postgres-powered successor to Firebase.

Instant secured a $3.4M seed round backed by Y Combinator, SV Angel, Paul Graham, Greg Brockman, and former Firebase CEO James Tamplin, and has since open-sourced its platform to serve developers building collaborative, real-time apps.