Ascend.io is a Palo Alto-based data engineering platform that uses AI agents to automate the building, running, and maintenance of data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and beyond. Founded in 2015 by ex-Googler and Ooyala co-founder Sean Knapp, the company replaces hand-coded ETL plumbing with a metadata-driven automation engine and DataOps Agents that can write code, fix incidents and tune performance on their own.
Shovels is an AI-powered building-permit intelligence platform that turns fragmented local-government data into a queryable source of truth on construction activity, covering more than 130 million permits across 1,800+ US jurisdictions.
Ethan Aaron is the founder and CEO of Portable, a New York based ETL/ELT company that builds the data connectors nobody else wants to build. Where the rest of the data-pipeline industry chases the same handful of popular sources, Portable went after the long tail - thousands of niche, bespoke business applications - with no-code connectors and flat, no-volume pricing. A Penn-trained mechanical engineer and Wharton economist who passed through Goldman Sachs and LiveRamp before founding the company, Aaron is one of the data world's most prolific public voices, posting daily on LinkedIn and pushing a blunt thesis: data teams exist to make money, not to collect tools.
Striim is a Palo Alto-based enterprise software company that builds a unified real-time data streaming and integration platform. Founded in 2012 by the team behind GoldenGate Software, Striim uses change data capture (CDC) to continuously ingest, process, and deliver high volumes of data with sub-second latency from databases, logs, and applications into cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Microsoft Fabric. Its platform powers real-time analytics, cloud migration, and AI-ready data pipelines for enterprises including UPS, American Airlines, Macy's, and Morrisons.
Unravel Data is a Mountain View, California company building an AI-native data observability and optimization platform. It plugs into modern data stacks - Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Cloudera - and uses AI, machine learning and a context graph of workloads, infrastructure and users to automatically troubleshoot, tune and control the cost of data pipelines. Where most monitoring tools stop at telling teams what is wrong, Unravel aims to fix it: its newest engine, Arvix AI, rewrites code, reconfigures infrastructure and validates the changes before deploying them, so data engineers can build instead of firefight.
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
WisdomAI is a San Mateo-based enterprise software company building a new category it calls agentic analytics. Founded in 2023 by a team of former Rubrik engineers, its platform lets business users ask questions of their structured, unstructured, and even messy data in plain language. Rather than letting a language model write answers (where it might hallucinate), WisdomAI uses LLMs only to generate the queries that pull real data from warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery. An Adaptive Context Engine governs metrics, definitions, permissions, and business logic so insights stay accurate and consistent. The company has raised $73M total and grown from two enterprise customers to roughly 40, including Cisco, ConocoPhillips, Patreon, and Descope.
Zenlytic is a New York based AI analytics company behind Zoe, an AI data analyst that answers complex business questions in plain language and returns verifiable, source-cited results. By pairing large language models with a governed semantic layer, Zenlytic lets non-technical teams self-serve trustworthy analytics from warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, generating dashboards, presentations and models without a data team in the loop.
Hevo Data is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that builds no-code, automated data pipeline infrastructure for modern data teams. Founded in 2017 by Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal, the platform connects 150+ data sources to warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift in real time - with zero maintenance overhead. Backed by Sequoia Capital India with $43M in total funding, Hevo serves 2,000+ data teams across 40+ countries, processing over 1 petabyte of data monthly. The company had $46.9M ARR in 2024 and is recognized as a G2 Leader in ETL and iPaaS categories.
Hightouch is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that pioneered Reverse ETL and built the leading Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). Founded in 2018 by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta - all alumni of Segment - Hightouch lets companies activate their warehouse data directly into 250+ business tools like Salesforce, Braze, and Google Ads without copying data to a separate CDP. Since launching AI Decisioning in 2024, Hightouch has evolved into an agentic marketing platform, helping brands like Warner Music Group, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify orchestrate personalized customer journeys using live warehouse data. The company reached $100M ARR and a $2.75B valuation in April 2026, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.
Chris O'Neill is a veteran technology executive with 25+ years of leadership across Google, Evernote, Glean, and Xero. Best known for leading Evernote's turnaround as CEO (2015-2018) and doubling its user base, he joined GrowthLoop as CEO in August 2024, steering the composable CDP startup through its AI transformation and Series D funding. A Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth) MBA and former Google Canada Managing Director who scaled that business to billions in revenue, O'Neill is also a board director at Gap Inc. and a published contributor to Fast Company and Fortune on the themes of AI, leadership, and compound growth.