
Braze built Currents to stream engagement data out of its platform. Now its Data Platform ingests, enriches and activates events natively, and marketers are asking whether Segment is still worth a second bill.
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
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.
Dispel is an Austin, Texas-based operational technology (OT) cybersecurity company that builds a Zero Trust Engine for industrial control systems. Its platform combines secure remote access, real-time industrial data streaming, unified OT connectivity (OTFusion), and 24/7 threat monitoring, all built around Moving Target Defense - a technique that constantly shifts network paths so attackers never get a stable target. Dispel lets manufacturers, utilities, energy operators, and government agencies give vendors and engineers fast, audited access to plant equipment without the friction of legacy VPNs and jump boxes.

Jacqueline Cheong is the co-founder and CEO of Artie, a San Francisco data infrastructure company that streams changes from production databases into warehouses in real time using change data capture. A UC Berkeley applied math graduate who spent her early career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and a software investor at the hedge fund Balyasny, she switched sides of the table in 2023 to build the kind of company she used to underwrite, co-founding Artie with her husband and CTO Robin Tang. After going through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, the pair grew Artie to a roster of enterprise customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy processing more than 700 billion rows a year, and raised a $12 million Series A led by Standard Capital's Dalton Caldwell in January 2026, on top of a $3.3 million seed.
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.

Jay Kreps is the co-founder and CEO of Confluent, the data-streaming company built around Apache Kafka, the open-source platform he co-created at LinkedIn in 2010. In December 2025, IBM announced a deal to acquire Confluent for roughly $11 billion. He also serves on Anthropic's Board of Directors and wrote the book I Heart Logs.