Aerospike built its reputation in the least forgiving corner of software: decisions that must be correct before the next millisecond arrives. Now the database specialist is turning that discipline toward AI, graph workloads and a managed cloud business.
Abhilash Chowdhary is the co-founder and CEO of Crustdata (YC F24), a San Francisco company building real-time B2B data and a search layer for AI agents. A computer science graduate of IIIT Hyderabad, he spent over a decade as a robotics and data engineer at Yahoo, Adobe, Postmates X, and Serve Robotics before turning a bootstrapped side project into a company that raised a $6M seed round led by Y Combinator and A Capital.
Crustdata is a San Francisco company that supplies real-time company and people data through clean APIs and webhooks built for AI agents. Founded in 2024 and part of Y Combinator's Fall 2024 batch, it pulls live data from many primary sources so AI SDRs, recruiting tools, and investment platforms can find the right person, watch for job changes and funding rounds, and act on fresh signals instead of stale databases.
Inauro is a Sydney-based Industrial AI and IoT software company that fuses real-time data from sensors, telematics, ERP, CRM and digital forms into a single operational view through its Perspio platform. It helps equipment rental, construction, cold chain, agriculture, logistics and mining operators automate workflows, monitor assets, cut maintenance costs and meet compliance obligations. Founded in 2020 by former Kennards Hire leaders Angus Kennard and Craig Kesby, Inauro monitors tens of thousands of connected devices worldwide and was backed by a A$3M investment from SafetyCulture.
Overdrive IOT is a Singapore-headquartered industrial IoT company that connects and monitors physical assets - vehicles, equipment, facilities and people - in real time on a single cloud platform. Founded in 2015 by Aston Chia and Zen Chin, it uses a mix of sensors, connectivity technologies and mesh networking to automate data sensing, then turns that data into tracking, alerting and command-centre visualisation for clients across aviation, logistics, construction and public services in Asia. Customers include Changi Airport, Sentosa, NTU, FedEx and Singapore's Ministry of Manpower. The company raised a US$2.9M Series A from Tin Men Capital.
Materialize is a New York-based data infrastructure company that builds a streaming SQL database. It continuously ingests data from operational systems, incrementally maintains the results of complex SQL queries as always-fresh materialized views, and serves them with low latency. Built on the open-source Timely Dataflow and Differential Dataflow engines and written in Rust, Materialize looks and behaves like Postgres, letting engineers use standard SQL to power real-time analytics, automation, personalization, fraud detection, and - more recently - a live context layer for AI agents and applications.
Occuspace is a smart-building company that measures how physical spaces are actually used. Its plug-in sensors passively read ambient Bluetooth and WiFi signals - never cameras or personal data - to estimate real-time occupancy, foot traffic and dwell time, then feed the numbers into a dashboard and the free Waitz app. Founded in 2017 by three UC San Diego roommates, it now serves 100+ university campuses plus corporate and federal customers, helping them cut wasted space, save energy and plan facilities from data instead of guesswork.
LigaData is a Silicon Valley enterprise AI and data company that helps regulated industries - primarily telecom operators and financial-services firms - turn siloed operational data into trusted, AI-ready intelligence. Founded in 2014 by Bassel Ojjeh and Krishna Uppala, it builds carrier-grade data products such as the Telecom Data Fabric, AI Fabric, SubscriberIQ apps and the Time Machine data-protection platform, plus managed and professional services. LigaData says its software supports 35+ communications service providers and hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide, helping telcos transform 'from Telcos into Techcos.'
Amper Technologies is a Chicago-based industrial IoT company that helps manufacturers see and improve what happens on their shop floors in real time. Its FactoryOS platform pairs non-invasive sensors that clip onto any machine - regardless of age or brand and install in about ten minutes - with AI-driven analytics that track machine utilization, OEE, downtime, labor and job performance. Founded in 2016, Amper turns legacy factory equipment into a source of live production data without expensive retrofits or complex IT integrations, and was acquired by ECI Software Solutions in December 2025.
RisingWave is a distributed SQL streaming database that lets developers ingest, transform, and serve real-time data using familiar PostgreSQL-compatible SQL instead of specialized stream-processing frameworks. Founded in 2021 by former AWS Redshift engineer Yingjun Wu, the San Francisco company decouples compute from storage in a cloud-native architecture, offers incremental materialized views, and integrates natively with Apache Iceberg to power a streaming lakehouse. Its open-source engine and managed RisingWave Cloud target fraud detection, monitoring, real-time analytics, and increasingly the data infrastructure behind agentic AI.
Nate Stewart is the CEO of Materialize, the streaming operational data warehouse based in New York. He took the role in April 2024 after seven years leading product at Cockroach Labs (CockroachDB), where he also sat on the board. He is a Michigan CS undergrad, an MIT Sloan MBA, and a former lead backend engineer at Bloomberg who won the MIT $100K entrepreneurship competition on his way out of business school.
DISTINCT Technologies is a Fairfield, Connecticut startup building live data intelligence infrastructure that turns real-time consumer interactions at live events into measurable ROI. Its white-label SaaS platform captures what it calls Actionable Consumer Touchpoints (ACTs) from stadiums, activations, and experiences, then routes that data into brands' existing CRM and MarTech systems for unified measurement, predictive insight, and personalized follow-up. Founded in 2022 by former Major League Baseball and Audacy executive Jimmy McCloud, the SOC 2-certified company has raised $3.5M in seed funding.
Jimmy McCloud is the Founder & CEO of DISTINCT Technologies, a live data intelligence platform that helps global brands capture and act on consumer data at live events - concerts, sports activations, fan zones, and brand experiences. With a career spanning MLB Advanced Media (where the team built what became Disney+), Entercom/Audacy (as EVP of National Business Development), and Division I baseball at Holy Cross, McCloud brings a rare combination of sports media pedigree and enterprise sales acumen to solving one of marketing's oldest problems: making live brand moments measurable. DISTINCT raised a $3.5M seed round in June 2024 led by York IE.
Pathway builds infrastructure for live AI - systems that think and learn in real time instead of being frozen at training. Its source-available Python framework powers high-throughput, low-latency ETL, stream processing, real-time analytics, and RAG/LLM pipelines that stay continuously in sync with sources like SharePoint, Google Drive, S3, Kafka, and PostgreSQL. The company is also developing BDH (Baby Dragon Hatchling), a post-transformer frontier model aimed at solving continual learning and long-horizon reasoning. Pathway is trusted by organizations including NATO, La Poste, and Formula 1 teams.
Redis is the company behind the world's most popular in-memory data store, the open-source database that began as a side project by Salvatore Sanfilippo in 2009 and now sits in the stack of most of the internet's largest applications. It sells managed and self-hosted enterprise versions - Redis Cloud and Redis Software - layered on the open-source core, and has pushed hard into real-time AI use cases like vector search and LLM memory. After a turbulent 2024 licensing fight that spawned the AWS-backed Valkey fork, Redis returned to an open-source license (AGPLv3) with Redis 8 in 2025.
Artie is a San Francisco-based, fully managed real-time data streaming platform that uses change data capture (CDC) and log-based replication to move production data across databases, warehouses, search systems, and vector stores with sub-minute latency and zero pipeline maintenance. Founded in 2023 by Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang and backed by Y Combinator, Artie pitches streaming-first data movement as the default for AI-era systems, replacing brittle batch ETL and self-managed Kafka.
Harmonic is a startup discovery engine built for venture investors, corporate development teams, and go-to-market professionals. It aggregates and continuously refreshes structured and unstructured data on more than 30 million companies and 190 million people, then lets users run granular, multi-criteria searches and AI-powered research to find promising startups before anyone else does. Founded in 2020 and now headquartered in New York, the company positions itself as 'the source of truth for startups.'

Jacqueline Cheong is the co-founder and CEO of Artie, a San Francisco data infrastructure company that streams changes from production databases into warehouses in real time using change data capture. A UC Berkeley applied math graduate who spent her early career as an equity analyst at Bank of America and a software investor at the hedge fund Balyasny, she switched sides of the table in 2023 to build the kind of company she used to underwrite, co-founding Artie with her husband and CTO Robin Tang. After going through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch, the pair grew Artie to a roster of enterprise customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy processing more than 700 billion rows a year, and raised a $12 million Series A led by Standard Capital's Dalton Caldwell in January 2026, on top of a $3.3 million seed.
Confluent is the data streaming company founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka. Its Data Streaming Platform - anchored by fully managed Confluent Cloud and a self-managed Confluent Platform, plus managed Apache Flink for stream processing - lets organizations connect, process, and govern data in motion across clouds in real time. Used by thousands of enterprises including a large share of the Fortune 500, Confluent went public in 2021 (NASDAQ: CFLT) and in December 2025 agreed to be acquired by IBM in a deal valuing it at roughly $11 billion.
Denodo is a Palo Alto-headquartered enterprise software company whose flagship Denodo Platform pioneered data virtualization - a way to query data wherever it lives without copying it first. Founded in 1999 by Dr. Angel Vina out of research at Spain's University of A Coruna, the company now serves hundreds of large enterprises and has been named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools for six consecutive years.
Hevo Data is a San Francisco-based SaaS company that builds no-code, automated data pipeline infrastructure for modern data teams. Founded in 2017 by Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal, the platform connects 150+ data sources to warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift in real time - with zero maintenance overhead. Backed by Sequoia Capital India with $43M in total funding, Hevo serves 2,000+ data teams across 40+ countries, processing over 1 petabyte of data monthly. The company had $46.9M ARR in 2024 and is recognized as a G2 Leader in ETL and iPaaS categories.
Alexander Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda Data, a San Francisco-based streaming data platform that reached unicorn status in April 2025 after raising $100M in Series D funding led by GV. A Colombian immigrant who moved to the US at 14, Gallego built a storage engine at Akamai that outperformed Kafka by 34x, then left to found Redpanda in 2019 with a singular mission: make real-time data infrastructure simple enough to deploy in 60 seconds. Today Redpanda powers mission-critical systems for Fortune 1000 companies, government contractors, and telecom firms, processing up to 14GB/second sustained throughput, and is pivoting toward enterprise agentic AI infrastructure as autonomous agents reshape how applications are built.
Bonsai Robotics is a San Jose-based agricultural autonomy company that builds vision-first AI systems for off-road farm equipment. Founded in 2022 by veterans of Blue River Technology and John Deere, the company's Intelligence Platform combines embedded autonomy software with retrofittable hardware kits to let existing and new farm machinery operate with minimal human input - even in GPS-denied fields, at night, and in heavy dust. With $28.5M raised and its July 2025 acquisition of farm-ng, Bonsai is expanding from specialty-crop orchards into bedded-crop row farming and modular electric robot platforms.
Vendia is an AI data platform that enables real-time, governed data sharing across companies, clouds, and regions. Founded by Tim Wagner (creator of AWS Lambda) and Shruthi Rao (former AWS blockchain head), Vendia helps enterprises like BMW, Delta Air Lines, and Fannie Mae break down data silos through its flagship product Vendia Share and newer MCP Gateway - allowing multiple parties to collaborate on trusted data without sacrificing security, compliance, or control.

Bassel Ojjeh is the CEO and co-founder of LigaData, a Menlo Park-based data platform company specializing in AI-powered telecom analytics and big data infrastructure. A Syrian-American serial entrepreneur, Ojjeh previously co-founded digiMine (behavioral targeting pioneer, later Audience Science), DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo, where he served as SVP), and nPario (big data platform). He also co-founded Syria's first English-language private university and SYNC, the first international tech conference held in Syria in 50 years, working to bridge Silicon Valley with Damascus.
Jonathan Ebinger is a General Partner at BlueRun Ventures and Co-Founder of Transform Capital, a late-stage growth fund built on an unprecedented philanthropic model that donates half the traditional GP carry to universities and nonprofits. With nearly 25 years in venture capital, he backed PayPal as one of its first institutional investors, led Series A investments in Kabbage (acquired by American Express), Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), and Waze (acquired by Google for $1.15B), and championed the thesis that real-time data would reshape lending, payments, and enterprise procurement. His four-factor investment framework - team, market, technology, and whether the company actually matters - reflects a philosophy that has made him one of Silicon Valley's most recognizable early-stage fintech investors.
Evan Kaplan is the CEO of InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB - the world's most popular open-source time series database with over 1.3 million developers. With nearly 20 years in CEO roles across multiple companies, he took InfluxData from a scrappy open-source project of 3,000 users to a platform handling billions of data points per second for 1,900+ enterprise customers. His path to the C-suite ran not through computer science but through environmental science degrees and years spent as a mountain guide in his late 20s - an unconventional origin story that shows up in how he thinks about resilience and long-term endurance.
Rowan Trollope is the CEO of Redis, the ubiquitous in-memory data platform powering real-time applications worldwide. A self-taught programmer who started coding on a Commodore 64 at age 11, he brings over 30 years of technology leadership across consumer products, cybersecurity, infrastructure, and collaboration software. Before Redis, he quadrupled revenue at Five9 and spent years at Cisco reinventing its collaboration business. At Redis, he has repositioned the company from a beloved developer caching tool into a critical AI infrastructure layer, launching semantic caching (LangCache), acquiring real-time data platform Decodable, and steering a controversial but successful licensing pivot that he says has produced record growth.
Ali Kutay is the founder, chairman and CEO of Striim, a Palo Alto streaming data integration company. A serial enterprise-software entrepreneur, he previously led GoldenGate Software (acquired by Oracle) and WebLogic (merged with BEA, acquired by Oracle), and ran Carnegie Mellon spin-out Formtek under Lockheed for seven years.
Zuzanna Stamirowska is the co-founder and CEO of Pathway, a Palo Alto-based AI infrastructure company building real-time data pipelines and post-transformer AI architectures. With a PhD in Complexity Science from Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a background in maritime trade forecasting recognized by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, she leads a team that counts NATO, Formula 1, and La Poste among its customers. Pathway's $10M seed round in November 2024 brought total funding to $14.5M, and the company's October 2025 launch of the Dragon Hatchling (BDH) - a brain-inspired, continual-learning architecture - positions it at the frontier of post-transformer AI.