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Hamzah Chaudhary Is Turning Business Intelligence Into a Builder’s Medium
Lightdash began as a scrappy internal tool that a customer asked to use. Hamzah Chaudhary turned that accidental signal into a broader argument: data teams should build with the discipline, freedom and leverage of software teams.
Michael Driscoll
Michael Driscoll is the co-founder and CEO of Rill Data, a company building fast, operational business intelligence dashboards on top of an embedded analytics engine. He previously co-founded Metamarkets, the ad-analytics firm whose internal database became the open-source project Apache Druid before Snap acquired the company in 2017. A bioinformatician turned serial entrepreneur, Driscoll began his career as a software engineer on the Human Genome Project, holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from Boston University and an AB from Harvard, and has spent three decades arguing that metrics, not tables or dashboards, are the real interface between data teams and the businesses they serve.
Ryan Janssen
Ryan Janssen is the Co-founder and CEO of Zenlytic, a New York-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that lets non-technical users query data in plain English. A former McKinsey consultant and 6-year venture capital investor with advanced degrees from Harvard and Oxford, Ryan co-founded Zenlytic in 2020 alongside CTO Paul Blankley after spotting a gap: companies had modern data infrastructure but no accessible way to use it. Zenlytic has raised $15.4M including a $9M Series A in 2024 led by M13, and its AI analyst Zoe can now onboard itself autonomously to any data warehouse.
Chris Merrick
Chris Merrick is the Co-Founder and CTO of Omni, a $1.5B-valued AI analytics platform that raised $120M in Series C funding in April 2026. A Princeton physics graduate and longtime Philadelphia resident, Merrick shaped the modern data stack long before Omni existed - he wrote the first lines of code for dbt, co-created the Singer open-source ETL standard at RJMetrics, and led engineering through Stitch's acquisition by Talend. At Omni, he reunited with college friends Colin Zima and Jamie Davidson to build a BI platform that combines governed semantic modeling with the flexibility of ad-hoc SQL analysis, serving customers like BambooHR, Perplexity, and BuzzFeed.
Colin Zima
Colin Zima is the Co-Founder and CEO of Omni, a San Francisco-based AI-powered business intelligence platform that reached a $1.5 billion valuation in April 2026 after raising $120 million in Series C funding. Previously Chief Analytics Officer and VP of Product at Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Zima co-founded Omni in 2022 with fellow Looker veterans Jamie Davidson and Chris Merrick, building a governed semantic layer and self-service analytics platform that achieved profitability while growing ARR 4x year-over-year.
Luke Han
Luke Han is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kyligence, the enterprise data analytics company built by the team that created Apache Kylin - the first Apache Software Foundation top-level project developed in China. A former eBay big data product lead, Han co-invented Apache Kylin in 2013, open-sourced it in 2014, then founded Kyligence in 2016 to commercialize the technology. Under his leadership, Kyligence raised $110M+ in funding including a $70M Series D, serves clients including UBS, McDonald's, and L'OREAL, and has evolved into an AI-powered metrics platform. Han is also a Microsoft Regional Director, Apache Kylin VP, Forbes Technology Council member, and Fortune China 40 Under 40 honoree.