data-pipelines
(7)
Nanda Santhana
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.
Ethan Aaron
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.
Barr Moses
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.
Ronen Schwartz
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
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
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
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.