lance-format
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Chang She
Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.
LanceDB
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.