modern-data-stack
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Soda Wants Your Data to Rat On Itself Before It Wrecks the Dashboard
The idea behind Soda is almost rude in its simplicity: software gets tested before it ships, so why does data get to skip the exam? Two Belgians decided it shouldn't.
Vero
Vero is a Sydney-based customer engagement platform that helps product-led teams send personalized email, mobile push and SMS messages triggered by what users actually do inside a product. Founded in 2012 by Chris Hexton and James Lamont, Vero pairs a real-time behavioural workflow engine with Vero Connect, an approach that reads directly from a company's data warehouse so teams can message customers without duplicating their data into yet another marketing tool.
Cleartelligence
Cleartelligence is a Newton, Massachusetts-based data and AI consulting firm that helps mid-market and enterprise organizations turn complex, siloed data into clear, usable intelligence. Founded in 2011, it delivers analytics and visualization, data engineering and architecture, artificial intelligence, and data strategy advisory across finance, healthcare and life sciences, manufacturing, retail, technology, and the public sector. Backed by private equity firm Align Capital Partners since 2022, the firm has grown through acquisitions of Winter Sun and Bardess Group and opened a delivery center in Hyderabad, India, in 2025.
Lightdash
Lightdash is an open-source business intelligence platform built natively on dbt. It turns a data team's dbt models into a governed semantic layer, letting analysts define metrics as code and letting everyone else explore data - and, increasingly, ask AI agents questions - without writing SQL. Founded in 2020 (originally as Hubble in Y Combinator's S20 batch), it positions itself as an open, developer-first alternative to Looker and is backed by Accel, Shopify Ventures, Operator Partners and Y Combinator.
Continual
Continual is a San Francisco AI company building a platform for running business operations with agents. Founded by repeat ML founders Tristan Zajonc and Tyler Kohn, it launched in 2021 as a declarative machine-learning platform on the modern data stack, then pivoted into the AI copilot and agent era - letting teams connect their tools and data, automate workflows across agents and people, and turn repeatable processes into agent-powered applications. Backed by $18.5M+ from Innovation Endeavors, Amplify Partners and others.
Ethan Aaron
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.
Mozart Data
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
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.
Atlan
Atlan is a data and AI control plane - a metadata-driven workspace that helps data teams catalog, govern, and collaborate across the modern data stack. Built like Figma for data, it sits between tools like Snowflake, Databricks, dbt and BI dashboards to give companies a single source of truth for what their data means, who owns it, and whether it can be trusted by humans or AI agents.
Owen Frivold
Owen Frivold is the CEO of Cleartelligence, a modern data and AI consulting firm headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts. A Stanford-educated co-founder of Hero Digital, Frivold brings 14+ years of experience shaping customer experience and digital transformation for brands like Apple, Sephora, Airbnb, and Lucid Motors. After founding Winter Sun LLC as a boutique strategy advisory, he joined Cleartelligence as President in April 2024 - when the company acquired Winter Sun - and was elevated to CEO in April 2025. He is known for turning complex data problems into actionable intelligence and driving enterprise AI readiness across financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, and retail.
Tristan Zajonc
Tristan Zajonc is the cofounder and CEO of Continual, a San Francisco-based AI agent platform enabling enterprises to automate complex workflows. A Harvard-trained public policy PhD turned serial AI entrepreneur, he previously founded Sense.io (acquired by Cloudera in 2016) and served as Cloudera's CTO for Machine Learning before pivoting back to founding. With over 15 years building machine learning infrastructure across academia and industry, Zajonc has been quietly shaping how enterprises operationalize AI - from SQL-driven ML pipelines to LLM-powered agents - long before it became fashionable.
Matt Bornstein
Matt Bornstein is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads infrastructure investing focused on AI, machine learning, and data systems. Promoted to GP in January 2026 after joining in 2019, he co-authored some of the most widely-read frameworks in modern AI - including 'Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications' and 'Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?' - shaping how the industry thinks about building with AI. His portfolio includes landmark bets on Cursor, Mistral, Character.ai (acquired by Google), Tabular (acquired by Databricks), and Replicate (acquired by Cloudflare).
Benn Stancil
Benn Stancil is a co-founder of Mode Analytics (acquired by ThoughtSpot for $200M in 2023), one of the most widely read voices in the data and analytics world, and an angel investor. He writes the popular newsletter at benn.substack.com - known for its witty, intellectually honest takes on the modern data stack, BI, AI, and startup culture. After a stint as Field CTO at ThoughtSpot post-acquisition, he now runs independently via benn.company, investing and writing with signature Friday dispatches that open with 'it's friday, and...' - a ritual his thousands of subscribers recognize instantly.