Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, the San Francisco company behind RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database for stream processing. A database researcher turned entrepreneur, he earned his PhD at the National University of Singapore, was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon under Andy Pavlo, and worked on the AWS Redshift team and at IBM's Almaden Research Center before founding RisingWave in 2021. His goal is to democratize real-time stream processing by making it as simple, affordable, and accessible as writing SQL. The company has raised more than $40 million, including a $36 million Series A.
Gilad Tal is co-founder and CEO of DualBird, a Boston-based deep tech startup rebuilding the foundation of analytics and AI data infrastructure by running silicon acceleration as cloud-native software. A Technion-trained electrical engineer and physicist with 14 years in ASIC and software development, he previously founded and led TerrainEDA, an EDA startup acquired by Synopsys. At DualBird he and his co-founders use rewritable FPGA hardware to plug into Apache Spark and Iceberg environments, claiming up to 100x faster performance and up to 90% lower cost with no changes to existing workflows.

Benjamin Wagner is VP of Engineering (listed as CEO in some directories) at Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse built for speed. A computer scientist trained at Technical University of Munich, Wagner moved from academic database research and a Snowflake internship directly into building Firebolt's query engine from the ground up. He is the author of InkFuse, an experimental database runtime that unifies vectorized and compiled query execution, and a regular speaker at CMU's database seminar series. His work sits at the intersection of high-performance analytics and open standards, particularly around Apache Iceberg and PostgreSQL compliance.