# Hamzah Chaudhary

> Hamzah Chaudhary is the co-founder and CEO of Lightdash, an open-source business intelligence company that grew from an internal consultancy tool into a platform for governed, self-serve analytics. A former software engineer and product leader at Cytora, he has built Lightdash around a consistent idea: data teams deserve the version control, testing, preview environments and leverage that software engineers take for granted. After starting with co-founder Oliver Laslett, joining Y Combinator’s S20 batch, pivoting from the data-quality product Hubble, and raising an $11 million Series A led by Accel in 2024, Chaudhary is now pushing the product beyond dashboards toward semantic layers, AI agents and custom data apps.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Lightdash
- **Organizations:** Lightdash, Hubble, Cytora, Founders Academy, Code at Uni, Telegraph Academy, McKinsey & Company, Deloitte UK, WaterForAir, Buzz 'n' Bake, Y Combinator
- **Education:** BA, European & Middle Eastern Languages & Linguistics (French & Arabic), University College London, Advanced Software Engineering Immersive, Hack Reactor, Summer 2020 batch, Y Combinator
- **Known for:** Co-founded Lightdash and led it from a consultancy-built internal tool to an open-source and hosted business intelligence platform., Participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 cohort with Lightdash’s precursor, Hubble., Raised an $8.4 million seed financing announced in 2022 and an $11 million Series A led by Accel in 2024.

## Career timeline

- **2009-2014** — Deloitte UK scholar.
- **2013-2016** — Founded and managed WaterForAir.
- **2014-2015** — Co-founded the London late-night baked-goods delivery service Buzz 'n' Bake.
- **2015** — Worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company.
- **2016-2019** — Joined Cytora as an early engineering hire, later moving through data science product management to Director of Product Management.
- **2017-2019** — Taught as Lead Software Engineering Instructor at Code at Uni.
- **2020** — Started a data consultancy with Oliver Laslett; the team joined Y Combinator S20 with the data-quality product Hubble.
- **2021** — Pivoted from Hubble to Lightdash and released the open-source BI product after early customer and Hacker News feedback.
- **2022** — Lightdash announced $8.4 million in seed funding, including a $6 million round led by Accel and an earlier $2.4 million round led by Moonfire.
- **2024** — Lightdash raised an $11 million Series A led by Accel and launched AI Analyst.
- **2025** — Lightdash open-sourced its semantic layer for use across BI tools, APIs and AI agents.
- **2026** — Chaudhary published Lightdash’s push beyond fixed dashboards toward governed Data Apps.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Lightdash and led it from a consultancy-built internal tool to an open-source and hosted business intelligence platform.
- Participated in Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 cohort with Lightdash’s precursor, Hubble.
- Raised an $8.4 million seed financing announced in 2022 and an $11 million Series A led by Accel in 2024.
- Reported 50x product-usage growth over two years and more than 5,000 teams self-hosting the open-source product as of October 2024.
- Contributed a chapter titled ‘Using Artificial Intelligence in Commercial Underwriting to Drive Productivity Growth’ to The AI Book in 2020.
- Helped lead data pipelines, analytics and product at insurtech company Cytora before founding Lightdash.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Published ‘It’s time to build on your data,’ positioning Lightdash Data Apps as a way to create custom, governed tools rather than rely only on fixed dashboards.
- **2026-06** — Lightdash announced a native MotherDuck integration supporting dbt-defined metrics, serverless analytics and governed dashboards.
- **2026-05** — Lightdash introduced Data Apps for building custom applications on governed semantic-layer data.
- **2025-11** — Spoke at a Data Berlin meetup about connecting semantic layers with AI analysts in real BI workflows.
- **2025-08** — Announced that Lightdash had open-sourced its semantic layer for use across tools, APIs and AI agents.
- **2024-10** — Announced Lightdash’s $11 million Series A led by Accel and the availability of AI Analyst in Lightdash Cloud.

## Links

- Website: http://hamzahchaudhary.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamzahc
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/hamzahc1
- GitHub: https://github.com/hamzahc1
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Lightdash

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/hamzah-chaudhary
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-18