cloud-data-warehouse
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Kenneth Truong Took the Offer Nobody Understood - Then Waited for the Spreadsheet to Work
He passed on familiar names for a seven-person startup, polished its first launch until dawn, watched nobody arrive, and stayed long enough to help rebuild the product around the cloud.
Sisu Data Could Explain the Drop. Then It Disappeared.
Sisu turned the most dreaded dashboard question - why did that number move? - into a machine-scale investigation. Its standalone run is over, but its sharpest idea now looks less like a feature and more like the direction of analytics.
Firebolt
Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse company building a low-latency, high-concurrency analytical database for engineers building data-intensive and AI applications. Founded in 2019 by former Sisense leaders, it decouples storage and compute to deliver sub-second SQL queries over terabyte- and petabyte-scale datasets, positioning itself on price-performance against Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and ClickHouse. Firebolt has raised roughly $269 million and reached a $1.4 billion valuation as a unicorn.
Sigma
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics and business intelligence company that lets anyone explore live data from cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery through a familiar spreadsheet-style interface - no SQL required. Now pivoting into 'agentic analytics,' Sigma layers no-code AI agents on top of governed warehouse data so business teams can ask questions, build apps and trigger actions directly against the data, with security and governance intact.
Benjamin Wagner
Benjamin Wagner is VP of Engineering (listed as CEO in some directories) at Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse built for speed. A computer scientist trained at Technical University of Munich, Wagner moved from academic database research and a Snowflake internship directly into building Firebolt's query engine from the ground up. He is the author of InkFuse, an experimental database runtime that unifies vectorized and compiled query execution, and a regular speaker at CMU's database seminar series. His work sits at the intersection of high-performance analytics and open standards, particularly around Apache Iceberg and PostgreSQL compliance.