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.
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.
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.
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.
Prat Moghe
Prat Moghe is the CEO of Promethium, a Menlo Park data fabric and self-service analytics startup he took over in October 2024 after founder Kaycee Lai moved to Chief Strategy Officer. A UCLA-trained electrical engineer, Moghe started at Bell Labs, ran product and strategy at Netezza through its $1.7B IBM acquisition, founded cloud data-as-a-service company Cazena (later acquired by Cloudera, where he became EVP), and served as president of TiE Boston.
Fred Goff
Fred Goff is the co-founder and CEO of Jobcase, the Cambridge-based social platform built for and around workers rather than recruiters. A first-generation college graduate from Toledo, Ohio, he ran roughly a billion dollars in emerging-markets trading on Wall Street before turning a machine-learning hedge fund team loose on the labor market in 2009. Jobcase now counts more than 130 million registered members and ranks among the largest online destinations for career services. Goff has become one of the more vocal executives arguing that the AI era should put people first, a stance that landed him on the 2026 TIME100 list.
Marilyn Matz
Marilyn Matz is the CEO and co-founder of Paradigm4, the Waltham, Massachusetts company behind SciDB, an array-native computational database built for the tangled, multi-dimensional data of genomics, clinical research, and imaging. She launched it in 2010 with database legend and Turing Award laureate Mike Stonebraker to move his MIT research into the hands of working scientists. Decades earlier she left MIT to co-found Cognex, now a global machine-vision powerhouse, where she ran worldwide engineering and later a business unit. A two-time technical founder who codes the deep infrastructure and still sells to the customer, Matz has spent a career making impossibly large scientific data explorable, reproducible, and fast.
Khachik Sahakyan
Khachik Sahakyan is the co-founder and CEO of Grovf, a deep-tech hardware company building AI back-end fabric IP, chiplets and 400/800 Gbps SmartNICs that move data between AI accelerators with sub-2 microsecond RDMA latency. A microwave engineer and former Yerevan State University lecturer turned founder, he splits Grovf between Newark, California and Yerevan, Armenia, and has spent the last several years convincing data-center buyers that the path to scale is in silicon, not software.
David Feinleib
David Feinleib is a serial entrepreneur, former venture capitalist, and author who is now Founder and CEO of It'sRapid.ai, a Palo Alto AI platform that turns product data and existing assets into finished commerce content for major brands. He has founded multiple companies acquired by EMC, HP, and Keynote Systems, sold Content Analytics to Syndigo in 2019, invested as a General Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and written four books including 'Why Startups Fail' and 'Big Data Bootcamp.'
Jim Bartoo
Jim Bartoo is the CEO and a board member of Visual Action Software, a Texas-based enterprise visualization company built on patented Flaremap treemap technology that helps organizations spot threats, monitor performance, and reduce risk. A Cornell-trained engineer with an MBA from the same school, he spent more than 25 years across Oracle, Business Objects, and EDS before leading The Hive Group and engineering its 2015 merger that formed today's Visual Action.
Sonia G.
Sonia G. is the VP of Marketing at Amazon Web Services (AWS), based in Dubai, UAE, where she leads marketing strategy for one of the world's most dominant cloud platforms across the MENA region. With an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management and prior experience at Accenture, she operates at the intersection of enterprise cloud solutions, demand generation, and go-to-market strategy for a company that serves millions of customers globally.
Alain Samaha
Alain Samaha is President & CEO of Teletrac Navman and President of Alternative Energy & Sustainable Fleets at Vontier, bringing over 20 years of technology leadership to the intersection of IoT, AI, and fleet management. A Stanford-trained aeronautical engineer turned enterprise software executive, he previously held senior roles at Trimble including President of the Utilities and Public Administration group. At Teletrac Navman - a global telematics SaaS leader with ~850 employees and $245M in annual revenue - Samaha is steering the company's push into AI-powered fleet safety, multi-energy transition, and a 'single pane of glass' platform vision for fleet operators worldwide.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Noam Ben-Zvi
Noam Ben-Zvi is the co-founder and CEO of Placer.ai, the location intelligence platform that turns anonymized phone movement into hard numbers for retailers, landlords, and city planners. He sold his first company, BlueTail, to Salesforce in 2012, then started Placer in 2016. By 2024 the company crossed $100M ARR and raised at a $1.5B valuation.
Deepak Diwakar
Deepak Diwakar is the Co-Founder and COO of Mindtickle, the AI-powered revenue enablement platform that became a $1.2B unicorn in 2021. An IIT Bombay computer science graduate and former machine learning engineer at PubMatic, Diwakar built Mindtickle's technology infrastructure from the ground up, helping transform how enterprise sales teams learn, practice, and perform. Under his watch, Mindtickle raised $281M in total funding, hit $118M+ in revenue, and earned recognition as a Forrester Wave Leader in Revenue Enablement Platforms.
Fangjin Yang
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database he helped create at Metamarkets in 2011. He turned a side project born from the millisecond demands of programmatic advertising into a $1.1B unicorn, raising $215M along the way. An original Druid committer and University of Waterloo-trained engineer, Yang now leads Imply's mission to power interactive, high-concurrency analytics applications at scale - with customers including Netflix, Atlassian, Salesforce, and Confluent.
Gian Merlino
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
Jamie Hale
Jamie Hale is the CEO and Co-Founder of Ladder, the Palo Alto-based digital life insurance company that has issued over $42 billion in coverage and raised $194 million in venture funding. Motivated by losing his father at age 11 and experiencing firsthand the stabilizing power of a life insurance payout, Hale set out to strip the life insurance industry down to its essential truth: a pure, flexible term product that takes minutes to buy online, not weeks of paperwork. Ladder reached a $900 million valuation in its 2021 Series D and has tripled revenue year-over-year, making Hale one of the most prominent voices in insurtech.
Luke Han
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
Marcos Martinez
Marcos Martinez is the CTO and Co-Founder of Fligoo, a San Francisco-based AI company building intelligent recommendation and predictive analytics solutions for financial institutions. Born in Córdoba, Argentina, he co-founded Fligoo in 2012 after earlier stints in software development. Under his technical leadership, Fligoo evolved from a social-graph gift recommendation engine into a WealthTech platform serving major institutions including Mastercard, Broadridge Financial Solutions, and Wells Fargo. Fligoo was named to the WealthTech100 in 2024 and has raised over $17M in funding, including a Series A round in 2020.
Raj Bains
Raj Bains is the Founder and CEO of Prophecy, a Palo Alto-based low-code data engineering platform that lets analysts and engineers build Apache Spark pipelines visually - generating real, production-grade code to Git. With a background spanning compiler engineering at NVIDIA (where he was a founding CUDA team engineer), product management at Hortonworks through its IPO, and a patent for designing a language for insurance contracts, Bains launched Prophecy in 2017 to solve a problem he had watched the data industry ignore for two decades: making data transformation fast and accessible for everyone, not just Spark specialists. The company has raised $114M+ from Insight Partners, SignalFire, JPMorgan, and HSBC, and counts Fortune 50 enterprises including HSBC, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Toyota among its customers.
Rohit Choudhary
Rohit Choudhary is the Founder and CEO of Acceldata, the company credited with coining the term 'data observability' and building the world's first enterprise data observability platform. A career data engineer who spent years at InMobi and Hortonworks before striking out on his own in 2018, he has raised over $105 million and built a platform used by Fortune 500 companies to monitor, manage, and ensure reliability of their data pipelines in an era where bad data feeding AI models is no longer just an inconvenience — it's an enterprise liability.
Sherman Ye
Sherman Ye is the Founder and CEO of NebulaGraph (vesoft Inc.), the company behind one of the world's most scalable open-source distributed graph databases. After engineering stints at Facebook and Ant Financial — where he worked directly on graph database infrastructure — Ye founded vesoft in 2018 to bring enterprise-grade graph database technology to a market hungry for connected-data insights. NebulaGraph can handle trillions of edges with millisecond latency, and counts Tencent, Meituan, and JD Digits among its users. Ye led the company through a $8M pre-A round in 2020 and a Series A in 2022 led by Jeneration Capital, while pioneering the GraphRAG concept that merges knowledge graphs with large language models.
Vadim Ogievetsky
Vadim Ogievetsky is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database powering data infrastructure at Netflix, Salesforce, Reddit, and 150+ enterprises. One of the original four co-authors of Apache Druid (launched 2011), he also co-created D3.js at Stanford's Visualization Group - the JavaScript charting library that became the foundation of modern data visualization on the web. Before Imply, he was UI Lead at Metamarkets (acquired by Snap). He built Plywood and Pivot, open-source tools for querying and exploring Druid data, and created KoalasToTheMax, a beloved interactive D3 visualization. Imply raised $215M total and reached unicorn status with a $100M Series D in May 2022.
Vikas Marwaha
Vikas Marwaha is the Co-Founder of Prophecy, an AI-powered data transformation platform trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises for building data pipelines at scale. With a career spanning Satyam, HP, Headstrong, and Wipro, he brings over two decades of enterprise sales and global partnerships experience to a company that raised $155M in total funding and achieved 3.5x revenue growth in FY2024. Prophecy's platform lets data teams build, deploy, and monitor pipelines visually while generating clean, open-source code - bridging the gap between business users and data engineers.
Eric Ye
Eric Ye is a General Partner at Eastlink Capital, a Menlo Park-based early-stage VC firm backing AI and data infrastructure founders. A seasoned technologist turned investor, Eric spent over a decade at eBay as Director of Tech Platform and Principal Architect before serving as CTO, SVP of Technology, and Chief Scientist at Ctrip (NASDAQ: TCOM), the world's second-largest online travel agency, where he led 4,000+ engineers and architected the company's transformation into a cloud-native, mobile-first marketplace. Holder of 31 U.S. and China patents, winner of China's Best CTO Award, and a founding partner of Eminence Ventures, Eric now backs mission-driven founders at the seed-to-Series-B stage across AI/ML, distributed databases, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and enterprise software.
Divakar Tantravahi
Divakar Tantravahi is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Innominds, a San Jose-based AI-first digital product engineering company with 1,400 employees and $80M in annual revenue. Starting his career at Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in 1987, he moved through Informix and a startup called Everypath before founding Innominds in 2003. Under his leadership, Innominds has become a full-cycle product engineering partner helping technology companies build products that land in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Recognized for his employee-centric leadership style, Tantravahi was named one of India's Best Leaders in Times of Crisis 2021 by Great Place to Work India and received ET Now's 'CEO with HR Orientation' Award in 2019.
Bassel Ojjeh
Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.