PostgreSQL grew out of the POSTGRES research project led by Michael Stonebraker at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1986. In 1995 two students added an SQL interpreter and called it Postgres95. The following year it became an open-source community project named PostgreSQL. No single company controls it: development is coordinated by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group.
A major version comes out every year, and each is supported for five years with quarterly minor releases. Features such as JSONB, logical replication, and extensions like PostGIS and pgvector have made it the default choice for many new applications and cloud database services.