database-systems
(2)
Yingjun Wu
Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, the San Francisco company behind RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database for stream processing. A database researcher turned entrepreneur, he earned his PhD at the National University of Singapore, was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon under Andy Pavlo, and worked on the AWS Redshift team and at IBM's Almaden Research Center before founding RisingWave in 2021. His goal is to democratize real-time stream processing by making it as simple, affordable, and accessible as writing SQL. The company has raised more than $40 million, including a $36 million Series A.
Benjamin Wagner
Benjamin Wagner is VP of Engineering (listed as CEO in some directories) at Firebolt, a cloud data warehouse built for speed. A computer scientist trained at Technical University of Munich, Wagner moved from academic database research and a Snowflake internship directly into building Firebolt's query engine from the ground up. He is the author of InkFuse, an experimental database runtime that unifies vectorized and compiled query execution, and a regular speaker at CMU's database seminar series. His work sits at the intersection of high-performance analytics and open standards, particularly around Apache Iceberg and PostgreSQL compliance.