data-pipeline
(22)
The Startup That Bet Data Movement Should Cost a Flat Fee
A 13-person shop in suburban Philadelphia is going after the plumbing nobody sees - the pipelines that move enterprise data - by making it workflow-driven, auditable, and priced like a utility instead of a taxi meter.
DataBahn
DataBahn is an AI-powered, security-native data pipeline and fabric platform that helps enterprises collect, enrich, orchestrate and optimize telemetry across security, observability, application and IoT/OT systems. Its agentic products - Cruz, Reef and Phantom agents - automate data engineering work, cut noise and reduce SIEM/telemetry costs by more than 50% while preserving visibility for security and IT teams.
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.
Auguria, Inc.
Auguria is a cybersecurity AI company that builds the Security Knowledge Layer (SKL), a vector-based platform that ingests the flood of logs, events, and telemetry that security teams collect, then denoises, classifies, and prioritizes it - filtering out roughly 99% of the noise so analysts can focus on the ~1% of events that actually matter. Founded in 2022 by Keith Palumbo and Chris Coulter and emerged from stealth in March 2024 with $6.5M in seed funding from SYN Ventures and SentinelOne's S Ventures, Auguria plugs into existing SIEM and data-lake infrastructure to cut security data costs and surface threats others miss.
Polytomic
Polytomic is a San Francisco data-movement company that unifies ETL, Reverse ETL, and CDC streaming in a single platform, letting teams keep data warehouses, databases, and SaaS tools in sync without maintaining brittle one-off pipelines. Founded in 2019 by former PlanGrid engineers Ghalib Suleiman and Nathan Yergler and backed by Y Combinator, it pairs a no-code interface for business teams with SQL, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code controls for data engineers.
Pulse
Pulse is a San Francisco AI company building production-grade document extraction for enterprises. Its vision-language models and OCR pipeline turn messy PDFs, scans, and spreadsheets into clean, structured, LLM-ready data - powering RAG, automation, and analytics across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain.
Ghalib Suleiman
Ghalib Suleiman is the CEO and co-founder of Polytomic, a San Francisco data-integration company that lets teams sync data between databases, warehouses, business systems like Salesforce and Stripe, spreadsheets, and arbitrary HTTP APIs without writing custom pipelines. He built the company with CTO Nathan Yergler after running the data team at PlanGrid during its growth from 25 to 350 people and its near-billion-dollar sale to Autodesk. Polytomic went through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, pivoted during the program, and raised a $2.4M seed, winning early customers including Brex, Vanta, Sourcegraph, and ShipBob.
Mozart Data
Mozart Data is a San Francisco-based startup that gives companies an out-of-the-box modern data stack - a managed Snowflake warehouse, no-code ETL connectors, a SQL transformation layer, and built-in observability - so non-engineers can go from siloed, messy data to analysis-ready in about an hour. Founded in 2020 by Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman and backed by Y Combinator, it lets startups and SMBs skip the months of plumbing usually needed to stand up data infrastructure.
Cribl
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.
Hevo Data
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.
Brian Raymond
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
Clint Sharp
Clint Sharp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Cribl, a data infrastructure company valued at $3.5 billion that helps Fortune 500 enterprises route, filter, and control their telemetry data at scale. Before building Cribl, he spent five years as Senior Director of Product Management at Splunk, where he and his co-founders identified the problem that would become Cribl's founding mission: data volumes were exploding, budgets were not, and enterprises needed a vendor-agnostic way to manage what goes where. Under Sharp's leadership, Cribl grew from a 2017 idea to more than $200M in ARR, serving 43 Fortune 100 companies - all while he also briefly served as interim Chief Revenue Officer during a pivotal growth moment.
Manish Jethani
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.
Rohit Choudhary
Rohit Choudhary is the Founder and CEO of Acceldata, the company credited with coining the term 'data observability' and building the world's first enterprise data observability platform. A career data engineer who spent years at InMobi and Hortonworks before striking out on his own in 2018, he has raised over $105 million and built a platform used by Fortune 500 companies to monitor, manage, and ensure reliability of their data pipelines in an era where bad data feeding AI models is no longer just an inconvenience — it's an enterprise liability.
Unstructured
Unstructured is a San Francisco company building the data layer for generative AI. Its open-source library and enterprise platform ingest PDFs, slide decks, emails, images and 70+ other file types, then transform them into clean, structured data that LLMs and RAG pipelines can actually use.
DatologyAI
DatologyAI builds an automated data curation platform that helps companies train better AI models faster, smaller, and cheaper. Founded in 2023 by former Meta AI, DeepMind and MosaicML researchers, the Redwood City startup has raised $57.6M to industrialize the messy art of preparing petabyte-scale training data.
Improvado
Improvado is an AI-powered marketing analytics and intelligence platform built for enterprises and agencies. Founded in 2015, it connects 1,000+ data sources - from Google Ads and Meta to Salesforce and Shopify - and pipes everything into a unified data layer that feeds an AI agent capable of generating dashboards, monitoring data quality, running A/B tests, and delivering cross-channel marketing insights in natural language. The platform covers the full analytics stack: ETL/ELT pipelines, data governance, AI-native BI dashboards, and agentic execution - all in one environment. Backed by $34M in funding from Updata Partners, Bullpen Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners, Improvado serves Fortune 500 companies and global agencies including ASUS, Eicoff, and Booyah Advertising.
Sid Manchkanti
Sid Manchkanti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pulse, a production-grade document intelligence platform that converts complex unstructured documents into LLM-ready structured data. A Berkeley CS graduate with experience at NVIDIA and D.E. Shaw, he co-founded Pulse in 2024 after going through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. The company raised a $3.9M seed round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and has processed over one billion pages for Fortune 100 enterprises across finance, healthcare, insurance, legal, and supply chain sectors.
Daniel Kravtsov
Daniel Kravtsov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Improvado, a San Francisco-based AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that aggregates data from 500+ sources into a unified pipeline. A serial entrepreneur with 15+ years in digital marketing and ad tech, Kravtsov previously founded RTB-Media (acquired by Between Exchange in 2016) and Rizzoma.com before pivoting in 2017 to build Improvado into a $34M-funded revenue data platform serving enterprise marketers worldwide.
Ari Morcos
Ari Morcos is the Co-Founder and CEO of DatologyAI, a Redwood City-based startup that automates the curation of training data for AI models. A Harvard-trained neuroscientist who spent two years at DeepMind and five at Meta AI Research (FAIR), Morcos pivoted from studying how biological brains learn to solving how artificial ones should eat - coining the phrase 'models are what they eat.' His company has raised $57.65M across seed and Series A rounds backed by Felicis Ventures, Radical Ventures, and angel investors including Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Jeff Dean. With an h-index of 35 and over 12,000 citations, Morcos bridges rigorous ML research and venture-scale ambition, targeting the data layer as AI's most underinvested frontier.
Ananth Packkildurai
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.
Benjamin Rogojan
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.