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.

Jacqueline Cheong is the co-founder and CEO of Artie, a San Francisco data infrastructure company that streams changes from production databases into warehouses in real time using change data capture. A UC Berkeley applied math graduate who spent her early career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and a software investor at the hedge fund Balyasny, she switched sides of the table in 2023 to build the kind of company she used to underwrite, co-founding Artie with her husband and CTO Robin Tang. After going through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, the pair grew Artie to a roster of enterprise customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy processing more than 700 billion rows a year, and raised a $12 million Series A led by Standard Capital's Dalton Caldwell in January 2026, on top of a $3.3 million seed.
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
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.
Redpanda Data is a high-performance streaming data platform built in C++ that is wire-compatible with the Apache Kafka API while ditching the JVM and ZooKeeper. Founded in 2019 by Alexander Gallego, the company helps engineering teams move terabytes of real-time data per day with a simpler, faster, and cheaper architecture, and has expanded its remit toward agentic AI infrastructure.