big-data
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Amr Awadallah and the question that keeps changing
He came from Cairo to Stanford expecting to become a professor. Three startups later, Amr Awadallah’s career traces a different education: how to turn information into something people can actually use.
SQream wants your hour back
A GPU database made an hour-long telecom query run in under 50 seconds. SQream’s larger wager is that enterprises will stop shrinking their questions to fit their computers.
Norman Kutemperor Kept Rebuilding the Same Company for the Next Computer Age
For more than four decades, the Michigan technologist has steered Scientel from supply-chain software to big-data databases and private AI systems. His career is a study in refusing to let a durable company become a museum piece.
Nguyen Nguyen Is Rewriting the Credit File
A Barclays credit-risk specialist saw what a missing credit history could cost. Thirteen years after coding a first score beside the Hudson, his company is trying to make lending see the people its paperwork misses.
The Chinese Software Company Quietly Running the World's Phone Bills
It was ZTE's software arm, then Alibaba bought it and gave it a whale for a logo. Today Whale Cloud's ZSmart platform quietly meters the calls, data, and monthly bills of more than a billion people across 80-plus countries.
The Delhi Firm Doing the World's Data Homework
Blackcoffer turns messy enterprise data into dashboards and decisions for clients from consulting giants to a national central bank - 110 people, offices on three continents, and a name that doubles as a mission statement.
The Company That Rents You a Sales Team in the Gulf - and the AI That Tells It Who to Call
Selling software into the Gulf usually means hiring locally, learning the market the hard way, and waiting months to get paid. Cadena turns that whole problem into a subscription.
The 34-Year-Old Engineering Firm Behind the Software You Never See
CyberVision has spent more than three decades doing the unglamorous work that makes connected products and data-heavy businesses function - from embedded code and IoT middleware to cloud migrations and machine learning systems.
TransUnion
The quiet third name on your credit report runs a billion-consumer data engine. Here is how a 1968 railcar spinoff became a Tru-branded machine for deciding who gets to borrow, rent and buy.
Global Mobility Service Inc.
Global Mobility Service Inc. (GMS) is a Tokyo-based FinTech and mobility company that gives people locked out of traditional credit a path to vehicle ownership. By pairing its proprietary IoT device, MCCS, with a cloud platform called MSPF, GMS lets lenders remotely manage and, if payments stop, safely disable a financed vehicle - turning driving behavior and payment data into a new form of creditworthiness. The model has extended auto loans to gig drivers, taxi operators and delivery workers across Japan, the Philippines, Cambodia and Indonesia who would otherwise be rejected by conventional screening.
JULO
JULO is an Indonesian fintech company building a digital credit platform that gives emerging and underbanked consumers fast, app-based access to cash loans, paylater, bill payments and installment credit. Founded in 2016 and licensed by Indonesia's Financial Services Authority (OJK), JULO uses machine learning and big data to score creditworthiness in minutes rather than the hours or days a traditional bank takes. By its ninth anniversary in December 2025 the company had disbursed more than USD 1.7 billion in financing to over 3.28 million users across all 38 provinces of Indonesia.
Master Works
Master Works is a Riyadh-based Saudi technology company that helps public- and private-sector organizations turn data into assets. Founded in 2010, it delivers data management, business intelligence, artificial intelligence, computer vision, cloud and digital-transformation services alongside home-grown software products such as the P+ project-management platform and the Baseer speech-analytics engine. With around 700 employees and offices across the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan and India, it serves more than 140 clients and is positioned as a national data champion for Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030.
OpenAgent
OpenAgent is a Sydney-based proptech company that helps Australians choose the right real estate agent to sell their home. Founded in 2013 by former McKinsey consultants Zoe Pointon and Marta Higuera, it analyses every property sale in Australia and pairs that data with human consultants to give sellers a free, personalised shortlist of local agents. The service is free for homeowners and monetises through referral fees paid by agents on successful sales, and it also runs free consumer tools such as OpenEstimates, property reports and suburb profiles used by more than two million visitors a year.
Quant Data & Analytics
Quant Data & Analytics is a Riyadh-based data science, AI and business-intelligence company that turns raw data into decisions for Saudi businesses and government. Founded in 2015, it pairs consulting with proprietary SaaS products - Suhail for real estate and location intelligence and Fruits360 for food-and-beverage analytics - and has analyzed more than a trillion data records across real estate and restaurant sectors. With around 160 employees and Series A backing, Quant positions itself as an engine for the data-driven decisions behind Saudi Vision 2030.
SuperAtom Fintech
SuperAtom Fintech is a Singapore-based financial technology company founded in 2018 as a spin-off from Cheetah Mobile. It builds digital lending and buy-now-pay-later products for underserved and unbanked consumers in emerging markets, using AI and big data to approve and disburse small, collateral-free loans quickly. Its flagship product UangMe operates in Indonesia under an OJK license, and the company has expanded toward the Philippines and Latin America with its Peso Chido brand. SuperAtom reports around 9 million registered users and over US$684 million in cumulative loan disbursements.
TabSquare.AI
TabSquare.AI is a Singapore-based restaurant technology company that builds an AI-powered digital ordering and customer engagement platform for the food and beverage industry. Its SmartTab tablet menus, self-service kiosks, QR-code web ordering and marketing tools use AI to deliver personalized menu recommendations, streamline ordering and payment, and lift restaurant revenue. Founded in 2012 by three INSEAD graduates, TabSquare serves thousands of outlets across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Europe, and has been a wholly owned subsidiary of global food-delivery group Delivery Hero since 2021.
Telunjuk.com (PT Telunjuk Komputasi Indonesia)
Telunjuk.com, operated by PT Telunjuk Komputasi Indonesia, began in 2012 as Indonesia's shopping search and price-comparison service, aggregating products and promotions from more than 50 e-commerce platforms to help consumers find the best deals. The team turned the data infrastructure behind that consumer product - tens of millions of listings and terabytes of e-commerce data - into Compas.co.id, a B2B market-intelligence and e-commerce enabler platform that helps FMCG brands track online sales, market share, pricing and competitors in real time. Founded by ITB engineering graduates Redya Febriyanto and Hanindia Narendrata, the company raised a Series A from Lippo Digital Ventures in 2015 and was majority-acquired by a subsidiary of PT Diamond Food Indonesia in 2022.
utu
utu is a Singapore-based travel-technology and fintech company that helps international shoppers get more from their VAT and GST refunds. Instead of accepting the standard cash refund (often only 55-60% of the tax paid), travelers use utu to upsize their refund - taking up to 40% more value in airline miles or hotel points, or converting refunds into retail vouchers worth more than the tax paid. Founded by tax-free-shopping veterans Asad and Ameer Jumabhoy, utu links travelers, retailers, duty-free operators, VAT refund companies, airlines and hotels into a single rewards ecosystem across markets including Italy, Switzerland and the UAE.
W-Locate Pte Ltd
W-Locate is a Singapore-based location technology company that blends machine-to-machine (M2M) telematics, big data, cloud computing and location intelligence. Its two flagship platforms - FIND (Fleet Intelligent Dynamics), a cloud fleet-management system, and XimLoc, a patent-pending SIM-based positioning technology that locates any SIM device indoors or outdoors without relying solely on GPS - serve enterprises, mobile operators and governments across Asia. Founded in 2010 by Stevie Ooi, the company has raised roughly US$2M+ from TNF Ventures and RHB-OSK, and works with partners such as Tata Communications to deliver location services for construction, logistics, waste management and smart-city use cases.
Vinay Samuel
Vinay Samuel is the founder and CEO of Zetaris, a data virtualization and analytical data fabric company he started in a Melbourne garage in 2013 after walking away from a million-dollar executive contract. A first-generation Australian and self-taught programmer since age 14, he spent two decades in senior roles at Teradata, Greenplum, Vertica and Hewlett-Packard before building technology that lets enterprises query data wherever it lives, without first moving it into a data lake. Zetaris has raised roughly $30 million from investors including In-Q-Tel, works with customers such as Telstra, NBN, Optus, Nokia and Melbourne Water, and now positions its platform to prepare data for AI faster and at lower cost.
DualBird
DualBird is a Boston-based data infrastructure company building a cloud-native engine that brings hardware-grade acceleration to big data and AI workloads. By running rewritable FPGA silicon on AWS as a software service, DualBird plugs into existing Apache Spark and Apache Iceberg pipelines and claims 10-100x faster processing at 50-90% lower cost, without asking teams to change their code or workflows. The company raised $25M in combined Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in November 2025.
Jethro
Jethro (JethroData) is an enterprise software company that makes interactive business intelligence run fast on big data. Its index-based SQL engine sits between BI tools like Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy and data stored in Hadoop or Amazon S3, using full indexing, auto-cubes and result caching to return queries in seconds across tens of billions of rows and thousands of concurrent users - at Hadoop-scale cost and without manual data engineering.
MDClone
MDClone is a healthcare data company that lets clinicians, researchers, and analysts explore patient data without touching real patient records. Its ADAMS platform ingests structured and unstructured health-system data into a longitudinal database, then generates statistically faithful synthetic data that carries no risk to patient privacy. That combination turns months-long, IRB-heavy data requests into self-service exploration, letting front-line staff ask their own questions, run analyses, and share results across organizations. Founded in Israel in 2016 and used across the U.S., Canada, and 100% of the Israeli healthcare market, MDClone has raised roughly $112M to expand data-driven discovery in health systems, government, payers, and life sciences.
Narrative I/O
Narrative I/O is a New York-based data infrastructure company that makes incompatible data work together. Its platform automatically normalizes disparate datasets, resolves identity, and lets companies securely buy, sell, enrich, and activate data - increasingly delivered natively inside a customer's own Snowflake environment so no data has to move. Founded in 2016 by Nick Jordan and led since 2023 by CEO Tim Mahlman, Narrative serves marketers, data scientists, and enterprises including Nielsen, TransUnion, Experian, and Fanatics.
Promethium
Promethium is a Menlo Park-based enterprise data company that builds an Instant Data Fabric - an agentic platform designed to give business users, analysts, and AI agents trusted, self-service access to data across hundreds of sources without first moving or centralizing it. Its federated query engine, 360 Context Engine, and conversational data-answer agent Mantra translate natural-language questions into governed SQL, metadata, lineage, and visualizations. Founded in 2018 by Kaycee Lai and now led by CEO Prat Moghe, the company has raised about $34.5 million to date, including a $26 million Series A led by Insight Partners.
Sigmoid
Sigmoid is an AI-first data solutions company that helps large enterprises turn complex data into measurable business value. Founded in 2013 by three IIT Kharagpur batchmates, the firm pairs deep data engineering with data science, MLOps, generative AI and agentic AI to build and operate the pipelines, models and analytics that Fortune 500 companies in CPG, retail, financial services and life sciences rely on for faster, data-driven decisions.
Eli Singer
Eli Singer is a serial technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of Jethro (formerly JethroData), a big data company that built an index-based SQL engine and BI-on-Hadoop acceleration layer for tools like Tableau, Qlik and MicroStrategy. Over a career spanning more than two decades he founded Memco Software, which reached a NASDAQ IPO, and co-founded and led WebCollage, a cloud e-commerce content platform later acquired by Answers.com. At Jethro he served first as co-founder and CEO and later as President, helping the company raise more than $12 million to make interactive analytics on Hadoop fast enough for real business users.
Gilad Tal
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.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that lets organizations store, analyze, and share data across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud without managing infrastructure. Founded in 2012 by three former data architects, it separated compute from storage to make large-scale analytics elastic and pay-per-use. Now positioned as an 'AI Data Cloud,' the company adds managed AI services through Snowflake Cortex and governed agentic tools, serving more than 12,000 customers worldwide.
Databricks
Databricks is a San Francisco-based data and AI company founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark. It builds the Data Intelligence Platform - a lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on open formats. Used by more than 10,000 organizations worldwide, Databricks helps enterprises store, govern, and analyze data and build AI applications on top of it, all under a single governance model.