data-intelligence
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David Clayton Works Where the Aisle Meets the Algorithm
At Target, David Clayton sits at a useful intersection: sales, marketing and business intelligence. His career offers a practical view of what modern retail leadership looks like when the store, the app and the data all have to agree.
Alex Song
He spent nine years reading markets for Goldman and Bill Ackman. Now he is handing small brands the data science that used to belong only to the giants.
Populix
Populix is an Indonesian technology-driven consumer research company that connects businesses, academics and government bodies with a verified panel of more than 700,000 respondents across Indonesia. Founded in 2018 by Cambridge graduates Timothy Astandu and Eileen Kamtawijoyo, it blends a mobile respondent app, a self-serve survey platform (PopSurvey) and AI tooling (the NeXa research assistant and synthetic respondents) to deliver market, policy and society insights faster and more affordably than traditional survey agencies. The Jakarta-based firm has raised about $14.2M to date, most recently a $4.3M Series B in 2025.
Suresh Srinivas
Suresh Srinivas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Collate and the creator of OpenMetadata, an open-source data intelligence platform. A longtime figure in the big-data world, he was an early Apache Hadoop developer and HDFS committer at Yahoo, co-founded Hortonworks, and served as Chief Architect for data at Uber before building Collate to help enterprises make their data usable, trustworthy, and well-governed.
Proxima
Proxima is a New York-based predictive data intelligence platform that helps consumer and DTC brands find high-value customers and scale paid media efficiently. It turns billions of anonymized ecommerce transactions from a proprietary network of tens of millions of shoppers into AI-powered audiences, conversion attribution, creative guidance, and industry benchmarks across Meta, TikTok, and Google. Founded in 2022 by Alex Song, the company raised a $12M Series A in April 2024 led by Mucker Capital.
Tracer
Tracer is a New York-based collaborative data intelligence platform that aggregates, normalizes, and enriches data from any source - ad platforms, sales systems, commerce, and finance - into a governed, unified layer that non-technical teams can query in real time. Incubated inside VaynerMedia starting in 2015 and spun out as an independent company in 2021, Tracer positions itself as 'the intelligence layer for AI-driven enterprises,' serving more than 200 customers including Sanofi, Papa Johns, Conde Nast, and Headspace. The company has raised roughly $30M-$58M across rounds, including an oversubscribed $18.1M Series A in August 2023.
Jeffrey Nicholson
Jeffrey Nicholson is the CEO and co-founder of Tracer, a New York-based data intelligence platform that turns fragmented, siloed marketing and business data into unified real-time insight. He built Tracer with CTO Leighton Welch inside VaynerMedia, where he served as the agency's first Chief Media Officer and grew the media department to roughly 250 people worldwide alongside Gary Vaynerchuk. A Babson-trained entrepreneur with more than 15 years across advertising, media, and technology, Nicholson went full-time as Tracer's CEO in January 2020 and has since raised a Series A round. He also founded the education venture NicholNotes and advises Roku, Pinterest, and Nextdoor.
The Freight Data You Already Owned, Finally Talking Back
Pallet Atlas is a data intelligence platform for logistics that ingests operational data from TMS, WMS, ERP systems, email, and documents, then normalizes and connects customers, subsidiaries, facilities, lanes, and contracts into a single network model. It enriches that model with outside signals like spot rates, lane density, distribution center locations, and weather, and lets operators ask plain-English questions to surface hidden revenue opportunities in seconds instead of days.
DvSum
DvSum is a Sunnyvale, California data intelligence company founded in 2014 by Aashish Singhvi. Its cloud platform unifies data catalog, data quality, data governance and data lineage into a single automated system, and layers AI agents on top - including a 'Talk to Your Data' conversational agent (CADDI) that lets business users query their data in plain language. More recently DvSum has extended its agentic AI approach into telecom with an Active Network Intelligence stack (AURA) that helps operators detect, diagnose and resolve network issues before subscribers call.
Collate
Collate is the company behind OpenMetadata, the fast-growing open source project for unified data discovery, observability, and governance. Founded by Apache open source veterans Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani, Collate layers AI agents, automation, and enterprise support on top of an open metadata 'context layer' so data teams - and the AI models they feed - can find, understand, trust, and govern their data. The company raised a $10M Series A led by Venrock in July 2025.
Jimmy McCloud
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Ajit Tharaken
Ajit Tharaken is the CEO of Consilient, a Washington, D.C. fintech building federated-learning AI to catch financial crime without ever moving a bank's data. A Columbia-trained computer scientist, he previously ran Opus Global (Alacra) through its sale to NICE Actimize, then led NICE Actimize's Data Intelligence business. He pitches a blunt thesis: the global anti-money-laundering system is outdated, and the fix is letting institutions train AI models locally and share the intelligence, not the data.
Harmonic
Harmonic is a startup discovery engine built for venture investors, corporate development teams, and go-to-market professionals. It aggregates and continuously refreshes structured and unstructured data on more than 30 million companies and 190 million people, then lets users run granular, multi-criteria searches and AI-powered research to find promising startups before anyone else does. Founded in 2020 and now headquartered in New York, the company positions itself as 'the source of truth for startups.'
Max Ruderman
Max Ruderman is the CEO of Harmonic, a New York-based data company building what he calls 'the source of truth for startups.' A former Google engineer who turned to entrepreneurship after a jiu-jitsu injury sidelined him, Ruderman helped grow Harmonic from a tool that scraped Delaware corporate filings into a real-time startup database used by investors at Floodgate, Craft Ventures, a16z, Accel, and companies like Brex, Notion, and Carta. He started as COO and became CEO, steering the company toward AI-driven sourcing with an investment agent built on LangGraph.
Alation
Alation is a Redwood City-based enterprise software company that built one of the first modern data catalogs by pairing machine learning with human curation. Its Data Intelligence Platform helps large organizations find, trust, and govern their data, and it has since pivoted toward an agentic AI platform that uses autonomous agents to automate data discovery, governance, and quality. The company serves roughly 450 enterprise customers, including more than a quarter of the Fortune 100, and has raised about $340 million at a valuation north of $1.7 billion.
Satyen Sangani
Satyen Sangani is the co-founder and CEO of Alation, the company that built the modern data catalog and turned an obscure metadata problem into a $1.7B category. A former Morgan Stanley analyst and decade-long Oracle executive turned founder, he hosts the Data Radicals podcast and argues, loudly, that data is power and the point of distributing it is to give that power away.
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.
Varun Banka
Varun Banka is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Atlan, the active metadata platform and data governance control plane trusted by 200+ enterprise customers across 50+ countries. Originally from Ranchi, India, Varun co-founded SocialCops with Prukalpa Sankar while studying at Nanyang Technological University - a data-for-social-good company that powered India's national data platform used by PM Modi and impacted over a billion lives. When their internal data tooling made their own team 6x more agile, they realized the world's data teams needed the same. Atlan was born, raised $105M Series C in May 2024 at a $750M valuation, and is now building what it calls the 'context layer for the AI-native enterprise.'