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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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 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 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, 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.