Tejas Manohar is the cofounder and co-CEO of Hightouch, the San Francisco company that helped create the Composable CDP category by bringing customer data platform capabilities directly onto the data warehouse. He moved to San Francisco at 16 to become one of Segment's first ten engineers, then left in 2018 to start Hightouch with Kashish Gupta and Josh Curl. Under his leadership Hightouch has crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue and raised a $150M Series D in April 2026 at a $2.75B valuation, pivoting the company toward AI Decisioning and agentic marketing.
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.
Databricks is a San Francisco-based data and AI company founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark. It builds the Data Intelligence Platform - a lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, analytics, and machine learning on open formats. Used by more than 10,000 organizations worldwide, Databricks helps enterprises store, govern, and analyze data and build AI applications on top of it, all under a single governance model.
Cleartelligence is a Newton, Massachusetts-based data and AI consulting firm that helps mid-market and enterprise organizations turn complex, siloed data into clear, usable intelligence. Founded in 2011, it delivers analytics and visualization, data engineering and architecture, artificial intelligence, and data strategy advisory across finance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, retail, technology, and the public sector. Backed by private equity firm Align Capital Partners since 2022, the firm has grown through acquisitions of Winter Sun and Bardess Group and opened a delivery center in Hyderabad, India, in 2025.
DataPattern is a San Ramon, California based IT services and consulting firm founded in 2019 that helps regulated and data-heavy enterprises move from legacy systems to modern data, AI and IoT platforms. Its teams build data engineering pipelines, generative AI and machine learning solutions, IoT use cases, cloud migrations and DevOps/MLOps practices, with a stated emphasis on data governance, quality and lineage as the foundation for reliable AI. The company works across manufacturing, healthcare, finance and energy, positioning itself as a hands-on transformation partner rather than a single-product vendor.
GrowthLoop is an agentic, composable customer data platform (CDP) that runs directly on a company's cloud data warehouse - Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks or Redshift - so marketing teams can build audiences, orchestrate journeys, and measure results without copying data into a separate system. Formerly Flywheel Software, the company pitches a 'Compound Marketing Engine' that pairs a no-code, drag-and-drop audience builder with AI 'Growth Agents' that suggest segments, build journeys, and optimize campaigns. It serves large enterprises including Ford, Costco, Albertsons, NerdWallet and major sports organizations.
InfoObjects Inc. is a San Jose-based AI consulting and digital transformation firm, founded in 2005 by Rishi Yadav. Built originally around the open-source big data stack - Apache Spark, Kafka and Hadoop - the company has repositioned around generative and agentic AI, offering services from data engineering and cloud migration to LLM fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation and AI application development. It partners with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Databricks, Anthropic and OpenAI, and works with enterprise clients across finance, healthcare, manufacturing and retail.
AI Squared is an enterprise AI integration company that helps organizations move machine learning and generative AI out of pilots and into the tools employees already use - CRMs, ERPs, spreadsheets, and custom apps. Its platform connects governed data sources like Databricks and Snowflake to business applications, addressing the 'last mile' problem that keeps most AI projects from reaching production. The company serves financial institutions, supply chain firms, and U.S. government agencies, and stewards the open-source reverse ETL project Multiwoven.
Amperity is a Seattle-based enterprise software company that builds an AI-powered customer data platform. Its patented machine-learning identity resolution engine, Stitch, unifies fragmented customer records from disparate sources - email, phone, address, loyalty and device IDs - into a single, accurate view of each customer. Founded in 2016 by Kabir Shahani and Derek Slager, Amperity helps global consumer brands like Alaska Airlines, DICK'S Sporting Goods, and Wyndham turn messy data into reliable profiles, predictive insights, and activation across marketing, analytics, and AI. The company reached unicorn status in 2021 with a $100M Series D and has since pivoted toward an AI-first, lakehouse-native architecture that runs directly inside Databricks and Snowflake.
Theom is a San Jose-based data security company building what it calls an AI-native Data Operations Center - a platform that discovers, classifies, tracks and protects enterprise data across cloud data lakes, warehouses, SaaS and generative-AI environments. Rather than guarding infrastructure or access alone, Theom takes a data-first approach: it maps who can touch which data, scores the financial value and risk of that data, detects breach behavior mapped to MITRE ATT&CK, and enforces policy in real time. Founded in December 2020 by former Cisco/Tetration and Google engineers, it raised a $20M Series A in May 2025 led by Wing VC with strategic backers Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures and SentinelOne's S Ventures, and counts Fiserv, Grammarly, Tradeweb and JetBlue among its customers.
Upriver is an AI-native data engineering platform that connects to a company's full data stack - Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt - then explores it, builds and validates pipelines, fixes them when they break, and encodes the tribal knowledge that usually lives in engineers' heads. Founded in 2024 by Talpiot graduates Ido Bronstein and Omri Lifshitz, the Tel Aviv company aims to make data infrastructure invisible so AI systems can run on a reliable data foundation without constant manual upkeep.
Polytomic is a San Francisco data-movement company that unifies ETL, Reverse ETL, and CDC streaming in a single platform, letting teams keep data warehouses, databases, and SaaS tools in sync without maintaining brittle one-off pipelines. Founded in 2019 by former PlanGrid engineers Ghalib Suleiman and Nathan Yergler and backed by Y Combinator, it pairs a no-code interface for business teams with SQL, monitoring, and infrastructure-as-code controls for data engineers.
Ascend.io is a Palo Alto-based data engineering platform that uses AI agents to automate the building, running, and maintenance of data pipelines across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery and beyond. Founded in 2015 by ex-Googler and Ooyala co-founder Sean Knapp, the company replaces hand-coded ETL plumbing with a metadata-driven automation engine and DataOps Agents that can write code, fix incidents and tune performance on their own.
Shovels is an AI-powered building-permit intelligence platform that turns fragmented local-government data into a queryable source of truth on construction activity, covering more than 130 million permits across 1,800+ US jurisdictions.
Ben Lerner is the co-founder and CEO of Espresso AI, a New York startup building what it calls the first neural compute optimizer - software that uses large language models to rewrite SQL and reallocate compute so companies cut their Snowflake and Databricks bills by up to 70%. A former Google and DeepMind engineer who worked on search, storage infrastructure, and early code-LLM research, Lerner left Big Tech to merge the two halves of his career - machine learning and systems performance - into a single product. Espresso launched from stealth in May 2024 with over $11 million in seed funding from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and FirstMark's Matt Turck.
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.
Unravel Data is a Mountain View, California company building an AI-native data observability and optimization platform. It plugs into modern data stacks - Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Cloudera - and uses AI, machine learning and a context graph of workloads, infrastructure and users to automatically troubleshoot, tune and control the cost of data pipelines. Where most monitoring tools stop at telling teams what is wrong, Unravel aims to fix it: its newest engine, Arvix AI, rewrites code, reconfigures infrastructure and validates the changes before deploying them, so data engineers can build instead of firefight.
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Lightup Data is a Mountain View-based enterprise data observability company that lets organizations monitor data quality at scale without moving their data. Its no-code platform pushes computation down into existing warehouses and lakehouses like Snowflake and Databricks, using AI-powered anomaly detection to catch data drift, outages, and discrepancies before they reach dashboards or AI models. Founded in 2019 and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightup serves enterprises including AMD, Skechers, and KFC.
WisdomAI is a San Mateo-based enterprise software company building a new category it calls agentic analytics. Founded in 2023 by a team of former Rubrik engineers, its platform lets business users ask questions of their structured, unstructured, and even messy data in plain language. Rather than letting a language model write answers (where it might hallucinate), WisdomAI uses LLMs only to generate the queries that pull real data from warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks, and BigQuery. An Adaptive Context Engine governs metrics, definitions, permissions, and business logic so insights stay accurate and consistent. The company has raised $73M total and grown from two enterprise customers to roughly 40, including Cisco, ConocoPhillips, Patreon, and Descope.
Zenlytic is a New York based AI analytics company behind Zoe, an AI data analyst that answers complex business questions in plain language and returns verifiable, source-cited results. By pairing large language models with a governed semantic layer, Zenlytic lets non-technical teams self-serve trustworthy analytics from warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery and Databricks, generating dashboards, presentations and models without a data team in the loop.
Reza Zadeh is the founder and CEO of Matroid, a Palo Alto computer vision company that lets people build and deploy AI detectors without writing code. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford, a founding team member at Databricks, co-author of Apache Spark's machine learning library MLlib, and the person who built the algorithm behind Twitter's first machine-learning product, Who To Follow. Born during the Iran-Iraq war in Ahvaz, raised in London and Toronto, he turned a Stanford PhD on large-scale graphs into a company betting that one day every camera will understand what it sees.
Sigma is a cloud-native analytics and business intelligence company that lets anyone explore live data from cloud warehouses like Snowflake, Databricks and BigQuery through a familiar spreadsheet-style interface - no SQL required. Now pivoting into 'agentic analytics,' Sigma layers no-code AI agents on top of governed warehouse data so business teams can ask questions, build apps and trigger actions directly against the data, with security and governance intact.
Acceldata is an enterprise data observability and agentic data management company that helps large organizations monitor, govern, and optimize the pipelines, warehouses, and lakes powering modern analytics and AI. Founded in 2018 by former Hortonworks engineers, it now serves customers like Oracle, Verisk, PhonePe, and Dun & Bradstreet, and recently launched an Autonomous Data & AI Platform built around its xLake Model Context Protocol for agentic workloads.
Atlan is a data and AI control plane - a metadata-driven workspace that helps data teams catalog, govern, and collaborate across the modern data stack. Built like Figma for data, it sits between tools like Snowflake, Databricks, dbt and BI dashboards to give companies a single source of truth for what their data means, who owns it, and whether it can be trusted by humans or AI agents.
Hightouch is a San Francisco-based B2B SaaS company that pioneered Reverse ETL and built the leading Composable Customer Data Platform (CDP). Founded in 2018 by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta - all alumni of Segment - Hightouch lets companies activate their warehouse data directly into 250+ business tools like Salesforce, Braze, and Google Ads without copying data to a separate CDP. Since launching AI Decisioning in 2024, Hightouch has evolved into an agentic marketing platform, helping brands like Warner Music Group, Chime, PetSmart, and Spotify orchestrate personalized customer journeys using live warehouse data. The company reached $100M ARR and a $2.75B valuation in April 2026, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bain Capital Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures.

Gopalakrishna Kuppuswamy is Co-Founder and CTO of Cognida.ai, an enterprise AI company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, that raised a $15M Series A from Nexus Venture Partners in February 2025. With 30+ years in technology - starting at CMC Limited in 1994 and spending a decade as VP at Hitachi Vantara - he now leads the engineering behind Zunō, Cognida's agentic AI platform that cuts enterprise AI deployment timelines from 6-8 months down to 10-12 weeks. Based in Hyderabad, he holds master's degrees from both the University of Hyderabad and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has helped grow Cognida.ai to 250+ employees and $37.7M ARR.
Raj Bains is the Founder and CEO of Prophecy, a Palo Alto-based low-code data engineering platform that lets analysts and engineers build Apache Spark pipelines visually - generating real, production-grade code to Git. With a background spanning compiler engineering at NVIDIA (where he was a founding CUDA team engineer), product management at Hortonworks through its IPO, and a patent for designing a language for insurance contracts, Bains launched Prophecy in 2017 to solve a problem he had watched the data industry ignore for two decades: making data transformation fast and accessible for everyone, not just Spark specialists. The company has raised $114M+ from Insight Partners, SignalFire, JPMorgan, and HSBC, and counts Fortune 50 enterprises including HSBC, JP Morgan, Microsoft, and Toyota among its customers.
Rohit Choudhary is the Founder and CEO of Acceldata, the company credited with coining the term 'data observability' and building the world's first enterprise data observability platform. A career data engineer who spent years at InMobi and Hortonworks before striking out on his own in 2018, he has raised over $105 million and built a platform used by Fortune 500 companies to monitor, manage, and ensure reliability of their data pipelines in an era where bad data feeding AI models is no longer just an inconvenience — it's an enterprise liability.
Privacera (now operating as Trust3 AI by Privacera) is a Newark, California-based enterprise software company that runs a unified data and AI access governance platform. Built by the co-creators of Apache Ranger, it gives Fortune 500 teams a single place to discover sensitive data, set policies, and enforce access across Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure, GCP, and the new generation of LLM-powered apps.