Astronomer is a New York-based data infrastructure company and the commercial force behind Apache Airflow, the open-source standard for data orchestration. Its flagship product, Astro, is a fully managed, cloud-native platform that lets data teams build, run, and observe data pipelines at scale, and its Astro Observe layer extends that into data operations and observability. Astronomer employs a large share of Airflow's core committers, serves 700+ enterprise customers, and raised a $93M Series D in May 2025 to power orchestration for enterprise AI workloads.
Flume Health is a New York-based healthcare technology company building operational infrastructure that connects the fragmented data ecosystem behind health plans. Founded in 2017 by Cedric Kovacs-Johnson and Vineeth Bhuvanagiri, Flume gives payers, third-party administrators, and vendors a way to move, translate, and make sense of healthcare data. It started as a plan administrator, pivoted to the Relay integration platform, and has since evolved into an AI-native data platform - mapping enterprise data estates into a living knowledge graph and running domain-specific AI agents so non-technical teams can query and act on healthcare data in plain language.
Mage is a San Francisco Bay Area software company that builds an open-source and enterprise data pipeline platform for integrating, transforming, and orchestrating data. Founded in 2020 by former Airbnb engineer Tommy Dang, Mage offers a notebook-style, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow, letting teams build batch and streaming pipelines in Python, SQL, and R. Its managed Mage Pro tier adds enterprise orchestration, collaboration, and AI-assisted authoring that generates, debugs, and refactors pipeline code from natural language.
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.
Portable is a New York-based ELT platform that builds data connectors on-demand, specializing in the long tail of niche business applications that larger integration vendors ignore. Founded in 2020 by Ethan Aaron, it lets data teams pull data from thousands of sources into warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, and PostgreSQL with no code, flat predictable pricing regardless of data volume, and hands-on custom connector development delivered in hours or days.
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.
Teramot is an AI-powered data infrastructure company that connects any AI model - Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini - to a company's real data in under an hour, with no technical team required. Its system of specialized AI agents inspects existing databases, warehouses, ERPs, CRMs and APIs, detects data-quality issues, proposes transformations and generates transparent, auditable SQL that produces a production-ready, queryable data layer called a Gold Table. Founded in 2022 (formerly Halley) and led by CEO Bruno Ruyu, the company is based in San Francisco with roots in Cordoba, Argentina.
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.
Ghalib Suleiman is the CEO and co-founder of Polytomic, a San Francisco data-integration company that lets teams sync data between databases, warehouses, business systems like Salesforce and Stripe, spreadsheets, and arbitrary HTTP APIs without writing custom pipelines. He built the company with CTO Nathan Yergler after running the data team at PlanGrid during its growth from 25 to 350 people and its near-billion-dollar sale to Autodesk. Polytomic went through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch, pivoted during the program, and raised a $2.4M seed, winning early customers including Brex, Vanta, Sourcegraph, and ShipBob.
Sammy Sidhu is the co-founder and CEO of Eventual, the company behind Daft, an open-source, Python-native data engine built to wrangle messy multimodal data like images, video, audio and LiDAR at petabyte scale. A UC Berkeley EECS grad with a background in high-performance computing and deep learning, he cut his teeth on Wall Street high-frequency trading and then on the perception stacks of self-driving cars at DeepScale (acquired by Tesla), Lyft Level 5 and Woven Planet (Toyota). After repeatedly watching brilliant engineers burn 80% of their time fighting data plumbing instead of building, he and Jay Chia turned that frustration into Eventual. Daft now processes petabytes daily at Amazon, CloudKitchens, Together AI and Essential AI, and the company has raised roughly $30M from investors including CRV, Felicis, Microsoft's M12 and Citi.
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.
Mozart Data is a San Francisco-based startup that gives companies an out-of-the-box modern data stack - a managed Snowflake warehouse, no-code ETL connectors, a SQL transformation layer, and built-in observability - so non-engineers can go from siloed, messy data to analysis-ready in about an hour. Founded in 2020 by Peter Fishman and Dan Silberman and backed by Y Combinator, it lets startups and SMBs skip the months of plumbing usually needed to stand up data infrastructure.
Peter Fishman is the co-founder and CEO of Mozart Data, a Y Combinator-backed startup that lets anyone spin up a modern data stack in under an hour without hiring a data engineer. An economics PhD who once crunched numbers for the Philadelphia Eagles and ran a bacon hot sauce company, Fishman spent fifteen years building the same data pipelines over and over at Yammer, Zenefits, Opendoor, and Eaze before deciding to package that work into a product everyone could use.
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.
Brian Raymond is the Founder and CEO of Unstructured, the leading enterprise ETL platform for making raw, unstructured data LLM-ready. A former CIA intelligence officer and White House National Security Council director, Raymond pivoted from government service through investment banking and AI startup Primer before founding Unstructured in 2022. In just two years, he raised $65 million across three rounds from Menlo Ventures, Databricks, IBM, NVIDIA, and others, building the critical 'first mile of AI' infrastructure that powers enterprise RAG pipelines and GenAI applications globally.
Manish Jethani is the Co-Founder and CEO of Hevo Data, a no-code data pipeline platform that helps over 2,000 companies in 40+ countries move data from 150+ sources into cloud data warehouses. A serial entrepreneur from Shahdol, India, who became the first person from his hometown to gain admission to IIT Roorkee, Jethani built two companies before Hevo - including food-delivery startup SpoonJoy, acquired by Grofers in 2015. Hevo has raised $43 million in total funding, including a $30M Series B led by Sequoia Capital India in 2021, and has reached approximately $46.9M in annual revenue.
Osama Elkady is the Co-Founder and CEO of Incorta, an enterprise data platform that eliminates the traditional ETL pipeline by mapping directly to systems of record for real-time analytics. After 20 years at Oracle - where he rose from junior engineer to VP of Applications Development and invented XML Publisher - he co-founded Incorta in 2014 with the conviction that businesses deserve instant access to their data. The company has since raised $192.6 million in total funding, counts Broadcom, Starbucks, and Hormel Foods among its enterprise clients, and has been recognized for delivering sub-second analytics at massive scale.
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.
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.
Unstructured is a San Francisco company building the data layer for generative AI. Its open-source library and enterprise platform ingest PDFs, slide decks, emails, images and 70+ other file types, then transform them into clean, structured data that LLMs and RAG pipelines can actually use.
Vikas Marwaha is the Co-Founder of Prophecy, an AI-powered data transformation platform trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises for building data pipelines at scale. With a career spanning Satyam, HP, Headstrong, and Wipro, he brings over two decades of enterprise sales and global partnerships experience to a company that raised $155M in total funding and achieved 3.5x revenue growth in FY2024. Prophecy's platform lets data teams build, deploy, and monitor pipelines visually while generating clean, open-source code - bridging the gap between business users and data engineers.
Improvado is an AI-powered marketing analytics and intelligence platform built for enterprises and agencies. Founded in 2015, it connects 1,000+ data sources - from Google Ads and Meta to Salesforce and Shopify - and pipes everything into a unified data layer that feeds an AI agent capable of generating dashboards, monitoring data quality, running A/B tests, and delivering cross-channel marketing insights in natural language. The platform covers the full analytics stack: ETL/ELT pipelines, data governance, AI-native BI dashboards, and agentic execution - all in one environment. Backed by $34M in funding from Updata Partners, Bullpen Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners, Improvado serves Fortune 500 companies and global agencies including ASUS, Eicoff, and Booyah Advertising.
Tommy Dang is the co-founder and CEO of Mage, an open-source data pipeline and orchestration platform he founded in December 2020 after five years at Airbnb, where he built the Experiences product and a low-code internal tool called Omni used by over 1,000 employees. Mage has raised $11.8M across two seed rounds and grown to 8,700+ GitHub stars, positioning itself as a modern, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow for building, running, and managing data pipelines at scale.
Bruno Ruyu is an Argentine physicist-turned-AI entrepreneur who has spent over two decades at the intersection of data, energy, and enterprise intelligence. As Founder and CEO of Teramot, he is building what he calls 'the first Artificial Data Team' — an AI-powered data infrastructure platform that connects to databases, writes production-ready SQL, and builds ETL pipelines autonomously. A veteran of YPF, Xerox, and executive roles at Reba and Grupo San Cristóbal, Ruyu trained his first neural network in 2005 before the term 'AI' became a buzzword, and today operates from San Francisco with a seed-funded company on a mission to democratize data engineering for every company on earth.
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.
Daniel Kravtsov is the CEO and Co-Founder of Improvado, a San Francisco-based AI-powered marketing intelligence platform that aggregates data from 500+ sources into a unified pipeline. A serial entrepreneur with 15+ years in digital marketing and ad tech, Kravtsov previously founded RTB-Media (acquired by Between Exchange in 2016) and Rizzoma.com before pivoting in 2017 to build Improvado into a $34M-funded revenue data platform serving enterprise marketers worldwide.

Benjamin Rogojan, known online as SeattleDataGuy, is a data engineer turned full-time independent consultant and content creator based in Denver, CO. After leaving Facebook/Meta in December 2021, he built a media and consulting empire: 100k+ YouTube subscribers, 100k+ Substack newsletter readers, and a thriving consulting firm serving healthcare, fintech, SaaS, and private equity clients. He also runs the Technical Freelancer Academy, helping engineers launch 6-7 figure consulting businesses.