Why the monitoring era was never going to be enough
Database teams do not fail for lack of graphs. They fail because investigation is still manual, tribal, and stuck to whoever knows the system best — while AI coding makes change volume climb and the old playbook (hire another specialist, buy a bigger instance, wait for the alert) falls further behind.
Chris Lalonde co-founded ObjectRocket and ran large managed database estates; later he operated secure communications at Wickr and inside AWS. Stephen Nolan led product at Anaconda at massive developer scale and ran global data services at Rackspace. Separately, both kept seeing the same pattern: tools that narrate failure after the fact, and advice that never had to survive a clone test.
DBGorilla is the answer they built: an IT-managed agent runtime that detects, investigates, validates on clones, and keeps humans in the approval loop. Not a chat window on production credentials. Not another dashboard with an "AI insights" badge.
We are not here to retire database specialists. We are here to stop spending them on the same triage loop every week.
Leadership
The people building the runtime
Chris Lalonde
Co-Founder and CEO
Chris co-founded ObjectRocket, the database-as-a-service platform that hosted some of the world's largest MongoDB workloads, and led the platform after Rackspace acquired it. He was COO at Wickr before its acquisition by AWS, then Director of Engineering within AWS secure communications. He holds six patents in authentication and fraud prevention.
Stephen Nolan
Co-Founder and COO
Stephen was SVP of Product at Anaconda, the data science platform used by tens of millions of developers, and previously General Manager of Data Services at Rackspace, responsible for database services globally. He brings product-led growth and enterprise operations experience to how DBGorilla ships and scales.
For engineering leaders
Proof before production is not a slogan
Agents should mediate access under IT policy.
Not leave every engineer to wire a personal model to production.
Recommendations without measurement are optional.
Clone-validated before/after is how trust is earned.
Institutional knowledge should love in the runtime.
Not only in one person's head.
Regulated and hybrid estates are first class.
SaaS is a deployment choice, not the only story.
Humans approve that reaches production.
Autonomy is unlocked, not assumed.
