
He spent years helping databases speak to one another. Then Steve Wilkes began asking a more impatient question: why wait for the data to arrive before making it useful?

From five-o'clock support calls at Oracle to Striim's real-time pipelines, Pareek has followed one durable idea: useful information often begins with the change that just happened.

Jacqueline Cheong is the co-founder and CEO of Artie, a San Francisco data infrastructure company that streams changes from production databases into warehouses in real time using change data capture. A UC Berkeley applied math graduate who spent her early career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and a software investor at the hedge fund Balyasny, she switched sides of the table in 2023 to build the kind of company she used to underwrite, co-founding Artie with her husband and CTO Robin Tang. After going through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, the pair grew Artie to a roster of enterprise customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy processing more than 700 billion rows a year, and raised a $12 million Series A led by Standard Capital's Dalton Caldwell in January 2026, on top of a $3.3 million seed.
Ali Kutay is the founder, chairman and CEO of Striim, a Palo Alto streaming data integration company. A serial enterprise-software entrepreneur, he previously led GoldenGate Software (acquired by Oracle) and WebLogic (merged with BEA, acquired by Oracle), and ran Carnegie Mellon spin-out Formtek under Lockheed for seven years.