data-visualization
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Andy Bergmann Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Things Feel Obvious
Before he marketed software that untangles prior authorization, Andy Bergmann made charts behave like stories, turned 37 years of waves into a game, invented a four-ended measuring spoon, and gave a giraffe an orchard. The medium keeps changing. The instinct does not.
Ellen Hui Put the Backend Engineer in the Boardroom
After petabyte queries, self-driving reliability, and real-time video, Ellen Hui tried to repair the place where company data so often goes to lose its freshness: the slide deck.
Connor Jones Is Building a Place Where AI Work Can Stick Around
After years inside finance and operations, the BitBoard co-founder is giving AI analysis a memory - with dashboards, traceable logic and a stubborn respect for work that can be checked.
Andriy Mulyar Is Teaching AI to Read the Blueprints
The Nomic founder went from clinical language models to open-source AI on a laptop. Now he is narrowing the map, building agents that can navigate the drawings, specifications and institutional memory behind the physical world.
Alex Bilmes Keeps Building the Missing Context
From Cloudability dashboards to Reflect's visualizations and Endgame's AI context layer, Alex Bilmes has spent his career turning scattered data into decisions people can actually use.
John Marshall
John Marshall is the President and CEO of Userful, the software company that swapped racks of proprietary AV hardware for a browser and a network cable. Named CEO in October 2018, he pivoted a video-wall vendor into a software-defined platform for enterprise-wide operational awareness, the Userful Infinity Platform, now used by hundreds of enterprises across control rooms, command centers and digital signage. A Northwestern and University of Michigan graduate with 25-plus years leading wireless, IoT and networking startups, he ran Userful to 50% year-over-year enterprise sales growth in 2024 with 80% of revenue flowing through a global channel of roughly 100 partners. Off the clock he is a former backcountry guide and adventure racer turned birder.
David Lehrer
David Lehrer is the founder and CEO of Conatix and its flagship product Cysana, an AI cybersecurity venture that turns executable files into pictures so neural networks can spot malware before it ever runs. A Harvard-trained policy researcher turned deep-tech operator, he built the company across Virginia, New York, Montreal, London and Berlin, in partnership with the University of Luxembourg's SnT research center. His unusual path runs from criminology at Oxford and economics at the Bank of Finland to a patented anti-ransomware engine trained on a European supercomputer.
Stephen Larson
Stephen Larson is a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who co-founded OpenWorm, the open-science effort to build the first complete digital organism by simulating the 302-neuron nervous system of the roundworm C. elegans. He is co-founder and CEO of MetaCell, a life-science software company that helps pharmaceutical firms and research institutions visualize, analyze, and collaborate on complex biological data. Trained at MIT in computer science and AI and at UC San Diego in neuroscience, he sits at the intersection of code and biology, betting that understanding a worm in silico is a first step toward understanding the human brain.
Jim Bartoo
Jim Bartoo is the CEO and a board member of Visual Action Software, a Texas-based enterprise visualization company built on patented Flaremap treemap technology that helps organizations spot threats, monitor performance, and reduce risk. A Cornell-trained engineer with an MBA from the same school, he spent more than 25 years across Oracle, Business Objects, and EDS before leading The Hive Group and engineering its 2015 merger that formed today's Visual Action.
Maggie McCullough
Maggie McCullough is the CEO and founder of PolicyMap, the Philadelphia-based mapping and data-visualization platform she launched in 2008. A former White House budget-office staffer turned housing researcher, she built PolicyMap after struggling to fit maps and data into her own policy work, betting that anyone should be able to make a map as easily as they shop online. The platform now serves universities, banks, health systems, nonprofits and governments, layering thousands of public and proprietary datasets into one searchable map. In December 2023 the company closed a $3 million Series A led by its former parent, the Reinvestment Fund.
Ryan Janssen
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Sameer Al-Sakran
Sameer Al-Sakran is the co-founder and CEO of Metabase, the open-source business intelligence tool that grew into an 8-figure ARR company used by more than 70,000 organizations. He spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar, then turned it into a product-led growth case study by burying a single call-to-action deep in the admin panel and letting the software sell itself. A career machine-learning and data person, he worked in data science, engineering, and venture before deciding the world needed a simpler way to ask a database a question.
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.
Fangjin Yang
Fangjin Yang is the co-founder and CEO of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database he helped create at Metamarkets in 2011. He turned a side project born from the millisecond demands of programmatic advertising into a $1.1B unicorn, raising $215M along the way. An original Druid committer and University of Waterloo-trained engineer, Yang now leads Imply's mission to power interactive, high-concurrency analytics applications at scale - with customers including Netflix, Atlassian, Salesforce, and Confluent.
Vadim Ogievetsky
Vadim Ogievetsky is the Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer of Imply, the commercial company behind Apache Druid - the real-time analytics database powering data infrastructure at Netflix, Salesforce, Reddit, and 150+ enterprises. One of the original four co-authors of Apache Druid (launched 2011), he also co-created D3.js at Stanford's Visualization Group - the JavaScript charting library that became the foundation of modern data visualization on the web. Before Imply, he was UI Lead at Metamarkets (acquired by Snap). He built Plywood and Pivot, open-source tools for querying and exploring Druid data, and created KoalasToTheMax, a beloved interactive D3 visualization. Imply raised $215M total and reached unicorn status with a $100M Series D in May 2022.
Chris Wilson
Chris Wilson is the Chief Executive Officer of Grasp Technologies, a Dublin, Ohio-based company that has been the backbone of travel data management for corporate programs and travel management companies since 1996. He brought 28+ years of enterprise software sales and leadership experience to the role when he joined in June 2024, having previously scaled revenue at Hazelcast (six years as CRO) and PSPDFKit (two years as CRO), and earlier built high-performing sales teams at Oracle, Skytree, and Magnet Systems. Based in Los Altos, California, Wilson is known for his go-to-market expertise and his vision for Grasp as a platform at the intersection of travel data consolidation, virtual payments, and AI-ready analytics.
Brendan Madden
Brendan Madden is the founder and CEO of Tom Sawyer Software, a Berkeley-based pioneer in graph visualization and analysis technology that he has led since 1992. With four decades of experience in the graph field - starting at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center - Madden built one of the world's foremost graph visualization platforms, serving industries from finance and government to manufacturing and cybersecurity. Under his leadership, Tom Sawyer Software has become a go-to platform for building scalable graph-powered applications, digital twins, and systems modeling tools, with the company's latest push into AI-powered graph technologies and SysML v2 viewer capabilities.
Swizec Teller
Swizec Teller is a Slovenian-American software engineer, bestselling author, and educator based in San Francisco who has spent 20+ years turning hard-won startup experience into actionable career wisdom. Best known for his Senior Mindset newsletter and books like 'Scaling Fast' and 'Senior Engineer Mindset,' he teaches engineers how to stop writing code and start building leverage. Currently building web UX for gene sequencing at Plasmidsaurus, he's the rare person who codes all day and then writes about coding all evening - and makes that seem entirely reasonable.