data-platform
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Ben Haynes Spent 22 Years Making the Database Feel Human
Before headless CMS had a name, a Brooklyn agency founder was tired of rebuilding the same back office. Two decades, five self-built versions and one beloved rabbit later, his workaround has become a lesson in patient software.
Shruthi Rao
Shruthi Rao is the co-founder of Vendia, a San Francisco multi-cloud distributed data platform that helps enterprises share and reconcile data in real time across companies, clouds, and tech stacks. Before Vendia she founded the blockchain practice at AWS, launching Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database, and led business development for the AWS serverless portfolio including Lambda and API Gateway. She set up what she describes as India's first crypto mining operation in 2011 and has advised the Ethereum Project, Ripple, MOBI, the Linux Foundation, and the World Economic Forum.
David Dokes
David Dokes is the co-founder and CEO of Polar Analytics, a first-party data and business intelligence platform built for Shopify and direct-to-consumer brands. Before Polar, he led growth at car-sharing marketplace Turo, where he ran a roughly $20M annual marketing budget. He teamed up with former Airbnb data scientist Charbel Seif in 2020 to give smaller retailers the kind of enterprise-grade data infrastructure that big companies take for granted, unifying scattered marketing, sales, and inventory data into one dashboard that installs in days rather than months. Under his leadership Polar has raised roughly $28.5M and now serves several thousand merchants across dozens of countries.
Eric Shoemaker
Eric Shoemaker is the Chief Executive Officer of Keebo, a startup that uses patented Data Learning algorithms to autonomously optimize cloud data warehouse workloads on Snowflake and Databricks. Appointed CEO in March 2026, he brings a long track record of scaling enterprise SaaS companies through growth and acquisition, including growing CloudHealth from zero to roughly $100 million in ARR and serving as Chief Revenue Officer at Device42 before its $230 million sale to Freshworks. He is a go-to-market and revenue operator focused on turning cloud data cost reduction into measurable business impact for enterprise customers.
Jerod Nelsen
Jerod Nelsen is a forward-deployed engineer and deployment strategist working out of the Office of the CEO at Peregrine, the San Francisco data platform that Sequoia valued at $2.5 billion for untangling the disparate systems public safety agencies rely on. A 6'7" former Princeton volleyball captain who studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering, he graduated summa cum laude in 2022, added a master's from Penn in 2024, and passed through EY-Parthenon and Audax before landing at one of the fastest-scaling govtech companies in the country. He sits where the code meets the customer: turning tangled agency data into something an analyst can actually search.
Abhishek Jha
Abhishek Jha is the Co-Founder and CEO of Elucidata, a San Francisco-based AI company making biomedical data AI-ready for drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D. A trained physical chemist with a PhD from the University of Chicago and postdoctoral work at MIT, he spent years at Agios Pharmaceuticals contributing to four FDA-approved first-in-class therapies before co-founding Elucidata in 2015. Under his leadership, the company has raised over $22.7M in funding, grown to 170 employees, and achieved $22.2M ARR, while evolving from a data-curation platform into an AI company solving out-of-distribution (OOD) problems in biomedical research - work that earned Elucidata recognition as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024.
Alexander Gallego
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Angel Vina
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.
Armon Petrossian
Armon Petrossian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Coalesce.io, a cloud-native data transformation platform built for the modern data stack. A first-generation Armenian-American from Portland, Oregon, he spent nearly a decade at WhereScape solving data warehouse challenges for Fortune 50 companies before co-founding Coalesce in 2020 with CTO Satish Jayanthi. Under his leadership, Coalesce has raised $81M+ in funding, achieved 4x year-over-year ARR growth, and grown to 140 employees, positioning itself as a leading ELT transformation platform for Snowflake, Databricks, and other cloud data platforms.
Ben Rudolph
Ben Rudolph is the co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, a San Francisco-based public safety data platform that raised $190M at a $2.5B valuation in 2025. A Stanford Computer Science graduate and former NCAA gymnastics All-American, Rudolph pivoted from Silicon Valley offers to spend two years building humanitarian tech for UNHCR's refugee camps before co-founding Peregrine with his college gymnastics teammate Nick Noone. Today, Peregrine's platform serves law enforcement agencies covering more than 80 million Americans, unifying fragmented data from body cameras, dispatch records, and crime databases into a single real-time intelligence system.
Chris Merrick
Chris Merrick is the Co-Founder and CTO of Omni, a $1.5B-valued AI analytics platform that raised $120M in Series C funding in April 2026. A Princeton physics graduate and longtime Philadelphia resident, Merrick shaped the modern data stack long before Omni existed - he wrote the first lines of code for dbt, co-created the Singer open-source ETL standard at RJMetrics, and led engineering through Stitch's acquisition by Talend. At Omni, he reunited with college friends Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson to build a BI platform that combines governed semantic modeling with the flexibility of ad-hoc SQL analysis, serving customers like BambooHR, Perplexity, and BuzzFeed.
Colin Zima
Colin Zima is the Co-Founder and CEO of Omni, a San Francisco-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that reached a $1.5 billion valuation in April 2026 after raising $120 million in Series C funding. Previously Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Zima co-founded Omni in 2022 with fellow Looker veterans Jamie Davidson and Chris Merrick, building a governed semantic layer and self-service analytics platform that achieved profitability while growing ARR 4x year-over-year.
Liran Zvibel
Liran Zvibel is the Co-Founder and CEO of WEKA, a Campbell, California-based AI-native data platform company valued at $1.6 billion. He co-founded WEKA in 2013 after earlier stints at XIV Storage Systems (acquired by IBM) and Fusic, bringing deep expertise in high-performance distributed storage. Under his leadership, WEKA has raised $465M+ in funding, surpassed $100M in annual recurring revenue, and built a platform powering 300+ of the world's largest AI and GPU deployments including 11 of the Fortune 50. A former Israeli military Captain who earned the Israeli Defence Award, Zvibel holds a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.
Osama Elkady
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
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.
Ryan Hanley
Ryan Hanley is the Founder and CEO of Equilibrium Energy, the company building PowerOS - an agentic AI platform purpose-built for the power industry. A civil engineer turned energy executive, Hanley spent nearly two decades inside the machine of grid transformation at PG&E, SolarCity, Tesla, and Shell before founding Equilibrium in 2021. With $100M+ raised and NRG Energy as a production customer, he is making a direct bet that AI can unify the fragmented data and systems that hold the power grid back.
Will Bewley
Will Bewley is the Co-Founder and CEO of Woflow, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform that structures and manages merchant and product data at scale for enterprises like DoorDash, Square, Walmart, Uber, and Deliveroo. Starting as a side project at a San Francisco co-working cafe, Woflow has digitized over 60 million products for 800,000+ restaurants and retail stores globally. Bewley, a Chartered Accountant from the UK who transitioned from London finance into Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, raised $10.8M in funding and grew Woflow into one of Inc. 5000's fastest-growing private companies.
Bassel Ojjeh
Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.
Matt Cain
Matt Cain is a technology executive who served as Chair, President, and CEO of Couchbase from April 2017 through September 2025, guiding the company from a growth-stage NoSQL database startup through a 2021 NASDAQ IPO and ultimately a $1.5 billion acquisition by Haveli Investments. With an engineering degree from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford, Cain built his career across a decade at Cisco Systems, senior roles at Symantec, and the presidency of Veritas Technologies' worldwide field operations before joining Couchbase. Under his leadership, Couchbase expanded from pure NoSQL into a multi-model developer data platform powering AI-enabled applications for global enterprises.
Jon Sobel
Jon Sobel is the co-founder and CEO of Sight Machine, the industrial AI company he built from scratch in 2011 after a career spanning the law departments of Yahoo and Tesla and executive roles at CBS Digital and SourceForge. A Princeton and Wharton graduate who also holds a Michigan law degree, Sobel spent over a decade as one of Silicon Valley's most senior in-house lawyers before betting his career on a hunch: that factory floors, drowning in data they could not use, were the biggest missed opportunity in enterprise software. Sight Machine has since raised over $124M, operates in 20+ industries across 20+ countries, and in 2025 closed an equity investment from NVIDIA's venture arm — proving that a former general counsel with a journalism fellowship can, in fact, build a category-defining AI company.
Nick Noone
Nick Noone is the co-founder and CEO of Peregrine, a San Francisco-based public safety data platform that unifies fragmented law enforcement data into a single system for real-time search, analysis, and decision-making. A Stanford-trained economist and statistician and former Palantir executive who led special operations data systems used by 18,000+ personnel across six continents, Noone co-founded Peregrine in 2017 to bring the same data-activation philosophy to local law enforcement. By early 2025, Peregrine had raised $250 million - including a $190M Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $2.5 billion valuation - and serves agencies covering more than 80 million Americans.
Saket Saurabh
Saket Saurabh is the co-founder and CEO of Nexla, an AI-powered data integration platform built for the age of generative AI. A serial entrepreneur who started as an engineer at NVIDIA — where he worked on GPU tech for the PlayStation 3 and automotive computing — he went on to co-found Mobsmith, a mobile ad-serving startup that was acquired by Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI). Armed with a BTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from The Wharton School, Saket founded Nexla in 2016 to automate the hardest parts of data engineering, earning recognition as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor and landing enterprise customers like DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express. Nexla has raised $33.5 million in funding.
Tim Wagner
Tim Wagner is the co-founder and CEO of Vendia, and the inventor of AWS Lambda - the service that launched the global serverless computing movement. With a PhD from UC Berkeley and stints at AWS (as GM of Lambda, API Gateway, and Serverless App Repository) and Coinbase (as VP Engineering), Wagner brings a rare double expertise in serverless infrastructure and blockchain. At Vendia, he has combined both disciplines to build a platform that enables secure, real-time data sharing across companies, clouds, and ecosystems - positioning it as the operating layer for the AI data era.