linux-foundation
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FinOps Foundation makes the cloud bill everyone's business
The cloud made spending easy. FinOps Foundation built a common language for the people left explaining the bill. Now AI is putting that language to work in new places.
Sumer Johal
Sumer Johal is a technology executive and entrepreneur with more than 25 years building digital-first organizations across agtech, bioenergy, semiconductors, financial services, and consumer retail. He grew up in a farming family in Punjab, India, studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, and has spent the past decade focused on food and agriculture. He founded the food-industry big-data company Agralogics, launched and led AgStack at the Linux Foundation, ran the precision-agriculture company Semios (which rebranded as Almanac), and became CEO of Full Harvest, the B2B produce marketplace, as it moved into AI-driven agentic orchestration for the food supply chain.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
Will Manning
Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.