cloud-data
(16)
The Company That Tried to Put One Lock on Every Data Door
Okera sold a deceptively simple idea: write the rule for sensitive data once, then make it follow the data everywhere. Databricks bought the company in 2023, just as AI made the old permission problem larger and stranger.
Steve Wilkes and the Case Against Yesterday’s Data
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?
Douglas Gourlay and the Seventy-Percent Decision
The former infantry officer and networking inventor now runs a data company by one compact rule: prepare hard, decide before certainty arrives, and own what happens next.
BMLL Cleans the Data Before the Quants Arrive
Every order, cancellation and execution leaves a trail. BMLL turns that unruly exchange exhaust into research-ready history, so expensive quantitative talent can investigate markets instead of repairing files.
Domo Built the Business Dashboard. Now Its $400 Million Exit Is the Real Data Point
Domo spent 16 years turning scattered corporate data into dashboards, apps, workflows, and AI agents. Its next chapter is a $400 million sale to Progress - a useful lesson in both the power and the economics of becoming a company’s data operating layer.
AtScale Refused to Kill Excel. Now Its Semantic Layer Has to Keep AI Honest.
The Boston software company spent a decade making old-school BI behave on new-school data. Its next customer is an AI agent - and the same boring layer may be what keeps the answers useful.
Joe Gaska Keeps Building Companies Around the Past
The Cape Cod native sold one software company, built another, and made a career from a stubborn idea: the future is easier to read when you keep the past.
Airbyte Killed Its First Product - Then Turned Boring Plumbing Into a $1.5 Billion Company
A paid marketing tool died when COVID froze its buyers. What survived was the expensive, brittle connector code underneath - and a repeatable playbook for turning customers' least-loved engineering work into a platform.
ThoughtSpot Is Teaching Business Intelligence to Answer Back
The company that made corporate data searchable is betting that the next dashboard will behave less like a report and more like a careful analyst - one that shows its work.
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.
Striim
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.
Hevo Data
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.
Armon Petrossian
Armon Petrossian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coalesce.io, a cloud-native data transformation platform built for the modern data stack. A first-generation Armenian-American from Portland, Oregon, he spent nearly a decade at WhereScape solving data warehouse challenges for Fortune 50 companies before co-founding Coalesce in 2020 with CTO Satish Jayanthi. Under his leadership, Coalesce has raised $81M+ in funding, achieved 4x year-over-year ARR growth, and grown to 140 employees, positioning itself as a leading ELT transformation platform for Snowflake, Databricks, and other cloud data platforms.
Manish Jethani
Manish Jethani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hevo Data, a no-code data pipeline platform that helps over 2,000 companies in 40+ countries move data from 150+ sources into cloud data warehouses. A serial entrepreneur from Shahdol, India, who became the first person from his hometown to gain admission to IIT Roorkee, Jethani built two companies before Hevo - including food-delivery startup SpoonJoy, acquired by Grofers in 2015. Hevo has raised $43 million in total funding, including a $30M Series B led by Sequoia Capital India in 2021, and has reached approximately $46.9M in annual revenue.
Kon Leong
Kon Leong is the CEO and co-founder of ZL Technologies, a Milpitas-based enterprise software company he built from the ground up in 1999 to tackle the problem nobody else wanted to solve: the mountain of unstructured human data - emails, documents, messages - that sits at the center of every corporate compliance, legal, and AI challenge. A serial entrepreneur who migrated from China to India to Canada to the US, Leong brought a rare mix of deep IT engineering, Wall Street M&A finance, and startup grit to a market that was just waking up to its own data problem. Today, ZL Technologies serves Fortune 500 companies and government agencies across financial services, healthcare, and the public sector, with a platform that manages data in-place at speeds up to 1,000 times faster than conventional approaches.
Mehdi Ouazza
Mehdi Ouazza is a Brussels-based Data Engineer and Developer Advocate at MotherDuck with 10+ years in the data space. He is the first DevRel hire at MotherDuck, a DuckDB-powered cloud analytics startup, where he grew social media by 450% and built a YouTube channel to 900K+ views. Creator of the 'Mehdio's Tech (Data) Corner' newsletter on Substack, founder of DataCreators.Club, and a prolific speaker and open-source contributor, Mehdi is known for demystifying data engineering and AI careers with humor, playfulness, and radical honesty.