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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'