Arun Kumar Ramchandran - known as 'Rak' - is the Chief Executive Officer of QBurst, a global product development and consulting firm backed by Multiples Private Equity. Appointed in April 2025 following a $200M investment, Rak brings 25 years of leadership experience spanning Infosys, Virtusa, Capgemini, and Hexaware Technologies. An IIT Bombay and IIM Calcutta alumnus based in Palo Alto, he is driving QBurst's transformation into an AI-first engineering services company with his 'High AI-Q' framework - embedding generative and agentic AI into every layer of software delivery.
Cribl is a vendor-agnostic data engine for IT and security teams that routes, shapes, reduces, and enriches observability and security telemetry between any source and any destination - letting enterprises escape vendor lock-in and tame runaway data costs.
Gruve is an outcome-based enterprise AI services company that helps large organizations move from AI strategy to production-grade deployment across customer experience, cybersecurity, data and platform engineering — billing on results rather than billable hours.
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 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.
Chris Merrick is the Co-Founder and CTO of Omni, a $1.5B-valued AI analytics platform that raised $120M in Series C funding in April 2026. A Princeton physics graduate and longtime Philadelphia resident, Merrick shaped the modern data stack long before Omni existed - he wrote the first lines of code for dbt, co-created the Singer open-source ETL standard at RJMetrics, and led engineering through Stitch's acquisition by Talend. At Omni, he reunited with college friends Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson to build a BI platform that combines governed semantic modeling with the flexibility of ad-hoc SQL analysis, serving customers like BambooHR, Perplexity, and BuzzFeed.
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.
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
Raj Bains is the Founder and CEO of Prophecy, a Palo Alto-based low-code data engineering platform that lets analysts and engineers build Apache Spark pipelines visually - generating real, production-grade code to Git. With a background spanning compiler engineering at NVIDIA (where he was a founding CUDA team engineer), product management at Hortonworks through its IPO, and a patent for designing a language for insurance contracts, Bains launched Prophecy in 2017 to solve a problem he had watched the data industry ignore for two decades: making data transformation fast and accessible for everyone, not just Spark specialists. The company has raised $114M+ from Insight Partners, SignalFire, JPMorgan, and HSBC, and counts Fortune 50 enterprises including HSBC, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Toyota among its customers.
Mikael Carlsson is the CEO of Forte Group, an AI-native product development partner with 900+ specialists and 25 years of history. A Swedish-born technology executive with 20+ years in digital engineering, he scaled Lohika 5X before joining Forte in October 2022. Under his leadership, Forte Group closed 2025 at an all-time financial high and has positioned itself around AI transformation, data engineering, and outcome-driven software delivery for Fortune 500 and mid-market clients across North America, Europe, and Latin America.
Bruno Ruyu is an Argentine physicist-turned-AI entrepreneur who has spent over two decades at the intersection of data, energy, and enterprise intelligence. As Founder and CEO of Teramot, he is building what he calls 'the first Artificial Data Team' — an AI-powered data infrastructure platform that connects to databases, writes production-ready SQL, and builds ETL pipelines autonomously. A veteran of YPF, Xerox, and executive roles at Reba and Grupo San Cristóbal, Ruyu trained his first neural network in 2005 before the term 'AI' became a buzzword, and today operates from San Francisco with a seed-funded company on a mission to democratize data engineering for every company on earth.
Andrew Luo is the Co-Founder and CEO of OneSchema, a San Francisco-based data integration platform that automates CSV imports and data validation for enterprise software companies. A Stanford CS graduate who left school a year early, he cut his teeth as one of Affinity's first engineers before co-founding OneSchema in 2021 after watching customer success teams drown in spreadsheet cleanup work. Backed by Y Combinator, General Catalyst, and Sequoia, OneSchema has raised $6.4M and serves 130+ companies including Toast, Vanta, and Scale AI. Andrew and co-founder Christina Gilbert were named Forbes 30 Under 30 in Enterprise Technology.
Ananth Packkildurai is a principal engineer, newsletter editor, angel investor, and advisor at the intersection of data engineering and community building. He founded Data Engineering Weekly, a Substack newsletter with 50,000+ subscribers covering vendor-neutral data engineering topics across 267+ issues. He built data pipeline observability at Slack during its hyper-growth years, shaped next-generation analytical platforms at Zendesk, and created Schemata - one of the earliest open-source data contract frameworks. He currently serves as Principal Engineer at Mural, while his newsletter and podcast continue to inform tens of thousands of data professionals worldwide.
Aurimas Griciūnas is a Lithuanian ML/AI engineer, founder of SwirlAI, and author of the SwirlAI Newsletter with 58,000+ Substack followers. A former CPO at neptune.ai (acquired by OpenAI), he now runs SwirlAI — an AI engineering education and consulting firm — and is a LinkedIn Top Voice in AI with 120,000+ followers. His newsletter covers AI engineering, LLMOps, RAG architectures, and agentic systems from a production-first, no-hype perspective.
Benjamin Rogojan, known online as SeattleDataGuy, is a data engineer turned full-time independent consultant and content creator based in Denver, CO. After leaving Facebook/Meta in December 2021, he built a media and consulting empire: 100k+ YouTube subscribers, 100k+ Substack newsletter readers, and a thriving consulting firm serving healthcare, fintech, SaaS, and private equity clients. He also runs the Technical Freelancer Academy, helping engineers launch 6-7 figure consulting businesses.
Ben Lorica is a machine learning researcher, media entrepreneur, and conference architect who spent over a decade as Chief Data Scientist at O'Reilly Media before launching Gradient Flow, his independent newsletter and research platform that Coursera ranked among the top 10 sites for data scientists. Known for the @bigdata Twitter handle he registered before 'big data' was a thing, he chairs The AI Conference, the AI Agent Conference, Ray Summit, NLP Summit, and Data+AI Summit while hosting The Data Exchange - a 342-episode podcast in the top 0.5% globally. He coined the PARK Stack (PyTorch, AI Frontier Models, Ray, Kubernetes) as the production AI infrastructure standard for the current era.
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.
Tristan Handy is the co-founder of dbt Labs (formerly Fishtown Analytics), the company behind dbt (data build tool) - the open-source transformation layer that helped define the modern data stack and spawned the analytics engineering profession. Starting with $10,000 of his own money in 2016, he bootstrapped for four years before raising $410M and reaching a $4.2B valuation. Following a 2025 merger with Fivetran, he now serves as Co-Founder and President of the combined entity on a path to IPO. He also writes the Analytics Engineering Roundup newsletter, which has 30,000+ subscribers.
Huzaifa Zahoor is a Pakistani-Australian software engineer and co-founder of Meyka AI, an AI-powered stock research platform serving 3,000+ monthly users. With over 4 years of experience building financial technology systems, he bridges data engineering, machine learning, and product development to democratize access to sophisticated financial analysis tools for retail investors and traders worldwide.