# Chang She

> Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at LanceDB
- **Organizations:** LanceDB, Tubi, Cloudera, DataPad, Lambda Foundry, Barclays Capital, AQR Capital Management
- **Education:** Degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and Political Science (incl. Master's in EECS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
- **Known for:** Co-author / early core developer of pandas, the foundational Python data-analysis library, Creator of the open-source Lance columnar format for multimodal AI data, Built LanceDB, an open-source multimodal database with 20M+ downloads by June 2025

## Career timeline

- **2006-2011** — Research Associate at AQR Capital Management, where roommate and colleague Wes McKinney introduced him to an early version of pandas
- **2011-2012** — Vice President at Barclays Capital
- **2012** — Co-founded Lambda Foundry, the commercial vehicle around pandas
- **2013-2014** — Co-founder & CTO of DataPad (Wes McKinney as CEO), a Python-stack data product
- **2014** — DataPad acquired by Cloudera
- **2014-2018** — Software Engineering Manager at Cloudera, leading Cloudera Navigator
- **2018-2021** — VP of Engineering at Tubi, building recommendation, ML-ops, and experimentation systems
- **2022** — Co-founded LanceDB (Y Combinator W22) with CTO Lei Xu
- **2023** — Public launch of LanceDB on May 1, 2023
- **2024** — $8M seed round led by CRV; adoption by Midjourney and others
- **2025** — $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures; launch of the Multimodal Lakehouse

## Achievements

- Co-author / early core developer of pandas, the foundational Python data-analysis library
- Creator of the open-source Lance columnar format for multimodal AI data
- Built LanceDB, an open-source multimodal database with 20M+ downloads by June 2025
- Co-founded DataPad, acquired by Cloudera in 2014
- Raised a $30M Series A for LanceDB in June 2025
- Adopted at scale by Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai

## Latest updates

- **2025-06** — LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures (with CRV, Y Combinator, Databricks Ventures, Runway and others) and launched the Multimodal Lakehouse; 20M+ open-source downloads reported.
- **2024-05** — LanceDB raised an $8M seed round led by CRV; TechCrunch reported Midjourney among its customers.

## Links

- Website: https://lancedb.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/changshe
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/changhiskhan
- GitHub: https://github.com/changhiskhan

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/chang-she
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-01