query-optimization
(3)
Espresso AI
Espresso AI is a New York-based startup that uses large language models and machine learning to automatically cut cloud data-warehouse bills. Founded in 2023 by three former Googlers, it markets a 'neural optimizer' - a set of AI agents that autoscale, schedule and rewrite SQL on platforms like Snowflake and Databricks, promising up to ~70% cost savings without changing query results. The company emerged from stealth in May 2024 with $11M in seed funding from Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross and FirstMark.
Unravel Data
Unravel Data is a Mountain View, California company building an AI-native data observability and optimization platform. It plugs into modern data stacks - Databricks, Snowflake, Google BigQuery and Cloudera - and uses AI, machine learning and a context graph of workloads, infrastructure and users to automatically troubleshoot, tune and control the cost of data pipelines. Where most monitoring tools stop at telling teams what is wrong, Unravel aims to fix it: its newest engine, Arvix AI, rewrites code, reconfigures infrastructure and validates the changes before deploying them, so data engineers can build instead of firefight.
Thierry Cruanes
Thierry Cruanes is the co-founder and CTO of Snowflake, the cloud data platform that executed the largest software IPO in US history in September 2020. A French-born database architect with a PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University, he spent 13 years at Oracle leading query optimization before betting everything on the cloud in 2012 - when Hadoop was supposed to win. He holds over 40 patents, writes code on weekends for fun, and helped architect the compute-storage separation that redefined modern data warehousing.