Ardent

Ardent is a Postgres branching service that clones a production database in under six seconds, so coding agents can test migrations, backfills and data cleaning on isolated copies without risking live data.

Ardent is a database branching service for Postgres, built around a specific problem: coding agents write database code, but testing it against production is risky and testing it against seed files is inaccurate. The product creates a full copy of a production database, which the company says takes under six seconds, and hands that copy to an agent to work on. Production stays untouched because each clone is isolated at both the compute and storage level. The target audience is engineering and data teams that already let AI agents write migrations, backfills or cleanup scripts. Typical jobs listed on the homepage include data cleaning (deduplicating and standardizing records), migration testing, backfills and verifying changes before they ship. Instead of maintaining synthetic fixtures that drift from reality, a team points the agent at a clone and checks the result against the same data the live system holds. In practice, the workflow resembles git branching applied to a database. Clones scale compute down to zero when idle, autoscale under load, and store only the changes made rather than duplicating the entire database. Ardent contrasts this with traditional replicas, which it describes as taking hours or days to create, copying the full database per clone, running always on and capping out at roughly 15 to 20 clones. A command line interface is shown on the site, and sign-up happens through a web app. Ardent branches databases without requiring a migration, and the homepage names Supabase, AWS RDS and Planetscale as supported providers, including Supabase auth and extensions. Among alternatives, it sits closer to copy-on-write branching platforms and managed replica setups than to general database clients or query assistants. The company is backed by Y Combinator and lists startups such as Supermemory, Beacons and Awaken Tax among its customers. Pricing is not published, and custom plans are arranged through the founder.