cloudera
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Cloudera Is Turning Its Hadoop Inheritance Into an AI Anywhere Bet
The company that helped commercialize Hadoop is betting its next act on a stubborn enterprise reality: sensitive data rarely lives in one cloud. Cloudera now wants to be the governed layer that lets analytics and AI travel to the data, wherever it sits.
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.
Chang She
Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.
Tristan Zajonc
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Cack Wilhelm
Catherine 'Cack' Wilhelm is a General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), where she focuses on cloud infrastructure, data infrastructure, and information security investments. A former Nike-sponsored professional runner and seven-time All-American at Princeton, she was the first American finisher at the 2007 World Cross Country Championship in Kenya. Wilhelm is the first woman promoted to general partner at IVP since 1983, having led major investments in companies like Perplexity, Cribl, CircleCI, and Monte Carlo Data. Her unconventional path from elite athletics to enterprise sales at Oracle and Cloudera to venture capital has shaped her approach to partnering with technical founders building transformative infrastructure companies.