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.
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
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.