YESPRESS // PROFILE NO. 047
Ali Kutay
He sells you the plumbing, not the faucet. And somehow, twice now, the plumbing ended up inside Oracle.
FILED: 500 EMERSON ST.
He sells you the plumbing, not the faucet. And somehow, twice now, the plumbing ended up inside Oracle.
Most founders chase the visible thing. Ali Kutay chases the thing underneath the visible thing - the pipe, the protocol, the daemon nobody opens but nobody can ship without.
The current job is Striim, the streaming data integration company he started in 2012 and has chaired since 2014. Striim moves enterprise data in real time - from Oracle databases to Snowflake, from on-prem to BigQuery, from a hospital's transaction system to a Databricks notebook before the row is even cold. The platform claims more than 3,500 source-target combinations. Sub-second latency. Change data capture as the engine.
It is, in other words, a continuation of an argument Kutay has been making for thirty-five years: that the boring middle layer is where the money is.
He has been right enough times to be taken seriously. He ran Formtek, a Carnegie Mellon spin-out, when Lockheed bought it in 1989 - then stayed seven more years operating it inside the defense contractor. He was president and CEO of WebLogic, the company that more or less invented the Java application server, before it merged into BEA Systems and got swallowed by Oracle in the 2008 acquisition. He chaired GoldenGate Software from 2004, and watched Oracle write the check for that one in 2009.
Now, with Striim, he has reassembled the GoldenGate core engineering team a decade after the exit and pointed them at the cloud. The band, as the joke goes, got back together.
Goldman Sachs Growth Equity led a $50 million Series C in March 2021, bringing total funding to $140.5 million. Summit Partners, Atlantic Bridge, Dell Ventures and Bosch Ventures were in the round. Bob Kelly, the former Microsoft executive now operating partner at Goldman, took a board seat.
The pitch was simple, and Kutay has been repeating versions of it for years: enterprises do not have a data problem, they have a data-movement problem. Their data exists. It just does not arrive in time to matter. Streaming integration is the answer.
We use machine learning to predict what will happen to enterprise data.// Ali Kutay, Intel Capital Global Summit interview
Kutay did his undergraduate and master's at Middle East Technical University - the engineering school in Ankara that produces a disproportionate share of Turkey's technology exports - and headed to Carnegie Mellon for PhD work between 1979 and 1983. He never left infrastructure software.
President and CEO of one of the first enterprise infrastructure software firms, founded as a Carnegie Mellon spin-out.
Lockheed Corporation buys Formtek. Kutay continues to run it under Lockheed Martin for seven more years.
President, CEO and angel investor in the company that pioneered the application server. Merges with BEA Systems.
Chairman and CEO of an e-business infrastructure software provider.
Takes the chairman and CEO chairs at the leading high-availability infrastructure software company.
Oracle picks up GoldenGate. The product becomes core to Oracle's data integration story.
Joins the company that becomes Striim. Takes chairman, president and CEO titles in 2014.
Goldman Sachs Growth Equity leads $50M round. Bob Kelly joins the board.
Launches the unified real-time data streaming and integration SaaS.
WebLogic became part of BEA, which Oracle bought in 2008. GoldenGate Software was bought by Oracle in 2009. Two of the products Ali Kutay sat at the top of are now inside Oracle's stack. He did not stay to manage them. He went back out and started over - which is, perhaps, the entire personality trait in a single sentence.
Sources: Striim press releases, Crunchbase, VentureBeat. Bars scaled to total-raised.
Kutay has been arguing for the last decade that enterprises were buying the wrong architecture. Batch ETL - the nightly job that lurches data from one warehouse to another while everyone sleeps - was built for a world where decisions could wait until morning. They cannot wait anymore. A fraud check, an inventory reroute, an AI model retrain: each of them is a real-time problem masquerading as a data problem.
Striim's pitch is that you do not need to rewrite your databases to solve this. You need change data capture (CDC), a streaming SQL engine that can transform and enrich on the fly, and connectors to wherever the data wants to land - Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric, Kafka, Azure Synapse. The bet is that real-time pipelines are not a luxury layer. They are the new default.
That bet looks better every year. The AI surge of the last two years has put a premium on freshness. Models trained on stale data hallucinate. Retrieval-augmented pipelines need streaming feeds. Striim's "AI-ready data pipelines" framing in the latest cycle is not marketing - it is the same engineering proposition Kutay has been selling since GoldenGate, dressed for the era.
What is striking about him as an operator is that he keeps building companies that look almost the same from a distance. Different decade, different acronym, similar architecture. He is not chasing the next thing. He is iterating on the same thing.
Striim Cloud is a powerful, cloud-based, SaaS platform that gives enterprises worldwide an invaluable advantage.// Ali Kutay, on the launch of Striim Cloud