real-time-data
(12)
Abhilash Chowdhary
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.
Nate Stewart
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.
Jimmy McCloud
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.
Jacqueline Cheong
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.
Alexander Gallego
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.
Bassel Ojjeh
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Saket Saurabh
Saket Saurabh is the co-founder and CEO of Nexla, an AI-powered data integration platform built for the age of generative AI. A serial entrepreneur who started as an engineer at NVIDIA — where he worked on GPU tech for the PlayStation 3 and automotive computing — he went on to co-found Mobsmith, a mobile ad-serving startup that was acquired by Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI). Armed with a BTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from The Wharton School, Saket founded Nexla in 2016 to automate the hardest parts of data engineering, earning recognition as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor and landing enterprise customers like DoorDash, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express. Nexla has raised $33.5 million in funding.