object-storage
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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.
Anand Periasamy
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.