data ex machina GmbH was established in August 2000 as a spin-off of the University of Mannheim's database research group. We are currently based in Heidelberg.

The founders are

• Our chief architect, Dr Guido Moerkotte, who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Mannheim and has a long record of high-quality publications in database research.
• Dr Carl-Christian Kanne, whose PhD thesis provided the core XML management technologies used in our XML database management system Natix.
• Dr Till Westmann, whose PhD research work on efficient database runtime systems is the foundation of the Natix system.