Astronomer is a New York-based data infrastructure company and the commercial force behind Apache Airflow, the open-source standard for data orchestration. Its flagship product, Astro, is a fully managed, cloud-native platform that lets data teams build, run, and observe data pipelines at scale, and its Astro Observe layer extends that into data operations and observability. Astronomer employs a large share of Airflow's core committers, serves 700+ enterprise customers, and raised a $93M Series D in May 2025 to power orchestration for enterprise AI workloads.
DataPattern is a San Ramon, California based IT services and consulting firm founded in 2019 that helps regulated and data-heavy enterprises move from legacy systems to modern data, AI and IoT platforms. Its teams build data engineering pipelines, generative AI and machine learning solutions, IoT use cases, cloud migrations and DevOps/MLOps practices, with a stated emphasis on data governance, quality and lineage as the foundation for reliable AI. The company works across manufacturing, healthcare, finance and energy, positioning itself as a hands-on transformation partner rather than a single-product vendor.
Mage is a San Francisco Bay Area software company that builds an open-source and enterprise data pipeline platform for integrating, transforming, and orchestrating data. Founded in 2020 by former Airbnb engineer Tommy Dang, Mage offers a notebook-style, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow, letting teams build batch and streaming pipelines in Python, SQL, and R. Its managed Mage Pro tier adds enterprise orchestration, collaboration, and AI-assisted authoring that generates, debugs, and refactors pipeline code from natural language.
DeltaStream is a Menlo Park-based company building a unified, serverless stream processing platform on top of Apache Flink. Founded in 2021 by Hojjat Jafarpour, the creator of ksqlDB, it lets teams build real-time streaming applications and pipelines using SQL - without wrestling with Flink's operational complexity. Its Fusion platform combines streaming, real-time, and batch analytics into a single serverless experience, integrating with Kafka, Kinesis, Snowflake, Databricks, and Apache Iceberg. The company has raised $25M total, backed by NEA, Galaxy Interactive, and Sanabil.
RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database that lets developers ingest, transform, and serve real-time data using familiar PostgreSQL-compatible SQL instead of specialized stream-processing frameworks. Founded in 2021 by former AWS Redshift engineer Yingjun Wu, the San Francisco company decouples compute from storage in a cloud-native architecture, offers incremental materialized views, and integrates natively with Apache Iceberg to power a streaming lakehouse. Its open-source engine and managed RisingWave Cloud target fraud detection, monitoring, real-time analytics, and increasingly the data infrastructure behind agentic AI.
Switchboard Software is a San Francisco-based enterprise data platform built by the team that launched Google BigQuery. It automates the messy work of collecting, transforming, blending and validating high-volume revenue and marketing data, then publishes trustworthy datasets into cloud warehouses like BigQuery and Snowflake. Marketing, revenue and data teams at media and publishing companies use it to stand up analytics and AI projects without waiting on scarce engineering resources.
Upriver is an AI-native data engineering platform that connects to a company's full data stack - Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt - then explores it, builds and validates pipelines, fixes them when they break, and encodes the tribal knowledge that usually lives in engineers' heads. Founded in 2024 by Talpiot graduates Ido Bronstein and Omri Lifshitz, the Tel Aviv company aims to make data infrastructure invisible so AI systems can run on a reliable data foundation without constant manual upkeep.
Nanda Santhana is the co-founder and CEO of DataBahn.ai, a Plano, Texas startup building AI-powered telemetry data pipelines for security, observability and AI workloads. Before DataBahn he spent nearly a dozen years as a founding member and SVP at Securonix, with earlier stints at Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Vaau. In June 2025 DataBahn closed a $17M Series A led by Forgepoint Capital, taking total funding to $19M.
Expanso is a Seattle-based distributed data processing company built on its open-source Bacalhau project. Instead of shipping raw data to a central cloud, Expanso runs lightweight agents that filter, transform, and govern data at its source - across edge devices, on-prem systems, and multiple clouds. The 'Compute Over Data' approach cuts egress and storage costs, keeps sensitive data in place for compliance, and speeds up pipelines feeding analytics and AI. Founded in 2022 by former Google, AWS, and Microsoft engineers, it raised a $7.5M seed round in 2023.
OneSchema is a San Francisco data-integration company that turns the messy, unglamorous problem of importing spreadsheets into a solved one. Its embeddable CSV importer lets software teams ship a polished, validated file-import experience in about a day instead of building and maintaining fragile parsing scripts for months. Around that core, OneSchema has grown into a broader platform - recurring file feeds and, more recently, AI agents that autonomously intake, clean, and reconcile legacy data - aiming to be the default layer for the 'long-tail' data that never quite fits an API.
Portable is a New York-based ELT platform that builds data connectors on-demand, specializing in the long tail of niche business applications that larger integration vendors ignore. Founded in 2020 by Ethan Aaron, it lets data teams pull data from thousands of sources into warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and PostgreSQL with no code, flat predictable pricing regardless of data volume, and hands-on custom connector development delivered in hours or days.
Ascend.io is a Palo Alto-based data engineering platform that uses AI agents to automate the building, running, and maintenance of data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and beyond. Founded in 2015 by ex-Googler and Ooyala co-founder Sean Knapp, the company replaces hand-coded ETL plumbing with a metadata-driven automation engine and DataOps Agents that can write code, fix incidents and tune performance on their own.
Teramot is an AI-powered data infrastructure company that connects any AI model - Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini - to a company's real data in under an hour, with no technical team required. Its system of specialized AI agents inspects existing databases, warehouses, ERPs, CRMs and APIs, detects data-quality issues, proposes transformations and generates transparent, auditable SQL that produces a production-ready, queryable data layer called a Gold Table. Founded in 2022 (formerly Halley) and led by CEO Bruno Ruyu, the company is based in San Francisco with roots in Cordoba, Argentina.
Ethan Aaron is the founder and CEO of Portable, a New York based ETL/ELT company that builds the data connectors nobody else wants to build. Where the rest of the data-pipeline industry chases the same handful of popular sources, Portable went after the long tail - thousands of niche, bespoke business applications - with no-code connectors and flat, no-volume pricing. A Penn-trained mechanical engineer and Wharton economist who passed through Goldman Sachs and LiveRamp before founding the company, Aaron is one of the data world's most prolific public voices, posting daily on LinkedIn and pushing a blunt thesis: data teams exist to make money, not to collect tools.
Pathway builds infrastructure for live AI - systems that think and learn in real time instead of being frozen at training. Its source-available Python framework powers high-throughput, low-latency ETL, stream processing, real-time analytics, and RAG/LLM pipelines that stay continuously in sync with sources like SharePoint, Google Drive, S3, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. The company is also developing BDH (Baby Dragon Hatchling), a post-transformer frontier model aimed at solving continual learning and long-horizon reasoning. Pathway is trusted by organizations including NATO, La Poste, and Formula 1 teams.
Striim is a Palo Alto-based enterprise software company that builds a unified real-time data streaming and integration platform. Founded in 2012 by the team behind GoldenGate Software, Striim uses change data capture (CDC) to continuously ingest, process, and deliver high volumes of data with sub-second latency from databases, logs, and applications into cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, and Microsoft Fabric. Its platform powers real-time analytics, cloud migration, and AI-ready data pipelines for enterprises including UPS, American Airlines, Macy's, and Morrisons.
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Foxtrot Services is a Washington, D.C.-based, Palantir-certified professional services firm that designs, implements and scales Palantir Foundry and AIP solutions for enterprise, startup and government customers. Founded and led by former Palantir operators, the team specializes in moving organizations past stalled AI pilots into production - through AI use-case acceleration, MVP development, data engineering and operational 'control tower' solutions across security, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, energy and global supply chain.
Lightup Data is a Mountain View-based enterprise data observability company that lets organizations monitor data quality at scale without moving their data. Its no-code platform pushes computation down into existing warehouses and lakehouses like Snowflake and Databricks, using AI-powered anomaly detection to catch data drift, outages, and discrepancies before they reach dashboards or AI models. Founded in 2019 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightup serves enterprises including AMD, Skechers, and KFC.
Barr Moses is the co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo, the company that created the data observability category and built one of the first end-to-end platforms for catching what she named 'data downtime' - the stretches when data is wrong, missing, or simply not trustworthy. A Stanford-trained mathematician and former Israeli Air Force intelligence data unit commander, she went from Bain consulting and a VP role at Gainsight to building a data reliability company valued at $1.6 billion. She co-authored O'Reilly's 'Data Quality Fundamentals' and is one of the most cited voices on why enterprises should treat broken data like broken software.
Allium is a New York and Singapore based blockchain data infrastructure company that turns raw, messy on-chain activity from 150+ chains and thousands of protocols into clean, query-ready data. Through APIs, real-time streams, data shares, and an analytics terminal, it serves as a system of record for on-chain finance, powering institutions like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Phantom. The company raised a $16.5M Series A in July 2024 led by Theory Ventures.
Confluent is the data streaming company founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka. Its Data Streaming Platform - anchored by fully managed Confluent Cloud and a self-managed Confluent Platform, plus managed Apache Flink for stream processing - lets organizations connect, process, and govern data in motion across clouds in real time. Used by thousands of enterprises including a large share of the Fortune 500, Confluent went public in 2021 (NASDAQ: CFLT) and in December 2025 agreed to be acquired by IBM in a deal valuing it at roughly $11 billion.
Acceldata is an enterprise data observability and agentic data management company that helps large organizations monitor, govern, and optimize the pipelines, warehouses, and lakes powering modern analytics and AI. Founded in 2018 by former Hortonworks engineers, it now serves customers like Oracle, Verisk, PhonePe, and Dun & Bradstreet, and recently launched an Autonomous Data & AI Platform built around its xLake Model Context Protocol for agentic workloads.
Coalesce is a data transformation platform built for the Snowflake Data Cloud (and now Databricks and Microsoft Fabric) that automates SQL pipeline development with a visual, metadata-driven, low-code interface aimed at enterprise data teams.
Imply is a San Francisco-based data analytics company that built its platform on Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database that its co-founders helped create. The company offers Imply Polaris, a fully managed cloud database-as-a-service for real-time analytics, and Imply Lumi, billed as the industry's first Observability Warehouse. With $215M in total funding and unicorn status at a $1.1B valuation, Imply serves 100+ enterprise customers including Atlassian, Reddit, and Cisco ThousandEyes, enabling sub-second query performance across terabytes to petabytes of streaming and historical data.

Ronen Schwartz is the CEO of K2view, an Israeli-founded data product company at the forefront of enterprise AI readiness. With 25 years in the data industry — including a 14-year run at Informatica and a stint at NetApp where he grew the cloud storage business 12-fold to dominate a $600M division — Schwartz took the helm at K2view in December 2023. He is focused on turning fragmented enterprise data into live, governed data products that power agentic AI applications at scale, positioning K2view as the infrastructure layer that makes real-time AI not just possible, but production-ready.
Tommy Dang is the co-founder and CEO of Mage, an open-source data pipeline and orchestration platform he founded in December 2020 after five years at Airbnb, where he built the Experiences product and a low-code internal tool called Omni used by over 1,000 employees. Mage has raised $11.8M across two seed rounds and grown to 8,700+ GitHub stars, positioning itself as a modern, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow for building, running, and managing data pipelines at scale.
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the co-founder and CEO of Pathway, a Palo Alto-based AI infrastructure company building real-time data pipelines and post-transformer AI architectures. With a PhD in Complexity Science from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a background in maritime trade forecasting recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she leads a team that counts NATO, Formula 1, and La Poste among its customers. Pathway's $10M seed round in November 2024 brought total funding to $14.5M, and the company's October 2025 launch of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) - a brain-inspired, continual-learning architecture - positions it at the frontier of post-transformer AI.
Sean Knapp is the founder and CEO of Ascend.io, an AI-native data engineering platform that unifies ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability into a single product. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously built iGoogle at Google and co-founded Ooyala — a video platform that raised $120M and sold for $400M+. At Ascend, he is building what he calls 'Agentic Data Engineering,' where AI agents handle the operational burden that buries data teams, freeing engineers for strategic work.