Ethan Aaron is the founder and CEO of Portable, a New York based ETL/ELT company that builds the data connectors nobody else wants to build. Where the rest of the data-pipeline industry chases the same handful of popular sources, Portable went after the long tail - thousands of niche, bespoke business applications - with no-code connectors and flat, no-volume pricing. A Penn-trained mechanical engineer and Wharton economist who passed through Goldman Sachs and LiveRamp before founding the company, Aaron is one of the data world's most prolific public voices, posting daily on LinkedIn and pushing a blunt thesis: data teams exist to make money, not to collect tools.
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.
Coalesce is a data transformation platform built for the Snowflake Data Cloud (and now Databricks and Microsoft Fabric) that automates SQL pipeline development with a visual, metadata-driven, low-code interface aimed at enterprise data teams.
Hevo Data is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that builds no-code, automated data pipeline infrastructure for modern data teams. Founded in 2017 by Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal, the platform connects 150+ data sources to warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift in real time - with zero maintenance overhead. Backed by Sequoia Capital India with $43M in total funding, Hevo serves 2,000+ data teams across 40+ countries, processing over 1 petabyte of data monthly. The company had $46.9M ARR in 2024 and is recognized as a G2 Leader in ETL and iPaaS categories.
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.
Prophecy is an AI-powered data engineering platform that turns visual workflows into production-grade Spark and SQL code, letting analysts and engineers build, deploy, and govern pipelines together on Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery.
Sean Knapp is the founder and CEO of Ascend.io, an AI-native data engineering platform that unifies ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and observability into a single product. A Stanford-trained computer scientist, he previously built iGoogle at Google and co-founded Ooyala — a video platform that raised $120M and sold for $400M+. At Ascend, he is building what he calls 'Agentic Data Engineering,' where AI agents handle the operational burden that buries data teams, freeing engineers for strategic work.