data-democratization
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Datavations
Datavations is a New York-based, AI-powered market intelligence platform built exclusively for manufacturers and distributors in the building materials and home improvement industries. It aggregates granular, store-level and SKU-level retail data across thousands of stores to give suppliers the cross-retailer visibility they otherwise lack - helping them optimize pricing, inventory, and product assortment, and walk into merchant meetings armed with data their retail partners don't have. Founded in 2020 by Philip Odelfelt, the company raised a $17M Series A in July 2025 led by Forestay Capital.
Brad Peters
Brad Peters is a serial analytics founder who has spent more than two decades trying to put real data science in the hands of people who do not write SQL. He founded Birst, one of the first cloud business intelligence platforms, grew it into a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader, and exited to Infor for $580 million in 2017. He is now founder and CEO of Scoop Analytics, a San Francisco startup building an AI 'data analyst' that connects to operational tools, investigates data on its own, and tells the story back to non-technical business users. He earlier helped build the analytics product line at Siebel Systems that became Oracle's OBIEE family, and started his career in Morgan Stanley's M&A practice.
Metabase
Metabase is an open source business intelligence and embedded analytics platform that lets anyone - not just analysts - ask questions of their data and build dashboards without writing SQL. Founded in 2014 and spun out of the Expa venture studio, it pairs a friendly visual query builder with a full SQL editor, connects to 20+ databases, and offers white-label embedding so software companies can ship customer-facing analytics. With a free self-hosted edition and paid Cloud and Enterprise tiers, Metabase is used by tens of thousands of companies worldwide.
Hex
Hex is a San Francisco-based AI analytics platform founded in 2020 by former Palantir employees Barry McCardel, Caitlin Colgrove, and Glen Takahashi. The company builds an integrated workspace where data teams and business users can analyze data, build interactive apps, and share insights using SQL, Python, and natural language — all in one place. With $177M in total funding including a $70M Series C in May 2025, Hex serves over 1,500 organizations including Reddit, Figma, Anthropic, Brex, and the NBA, replacing fragmented tool stacks with a single governed platform powered by AI agents.
Angel Vina
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.
Luke Han
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.
Prukalpa Sankar
Prukalpa Sankar is the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlan, a $750M-valued platform building the context layer for data and AI - used by Mastercard, JP Morgan, Zoom, Dropbox, and General Motors. Before Atlan, she co-founded SocialCops, which built India's National Data Platform and the UN's SDG tracker operating across 50+ countries. A TED Speaker, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree, Prukalpa has raised over $206M and turned a midnight brainstorm about broken streetlights into one of the fastest-growing data governance companies on the planet.