DataCamp is an online learning platform that teaches data and AI skills through short, browser-based interactive exercises. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York, it offers 700+ courses in Python, R, SQL, Power BI, Tableau, and generative AI, along with hands-on projects, skill assessments, and industry certifications. The company serves both individual learners and enterprises, having grown to more than 10 million learners and thousands of business customers who use it to close data and AI skills gaps.
Directus is an open-source data platform that wraps any SQL database with an instant REST and GraphQL API plus a no-code admin app, letting developers and non-technical users manage content and data without building a backend from scratch. Founded on a project Ben Haynes started in 2004 and incorporated as a company in 2020, Directus has surpassed 30 million downloads and is used by organizations including Adobe, Bose, Tripadvisor, AT&T and the U.S. Navy.
Liquibase is an Austin-based software company behind the widely used open-source database change management tool of the same name. It automates, versions, and governs how database schema changes move from a developer's laptop into production, bringing the same CI/CD discipline that software code enjoys to the database. Its commercial platform, now sold as Liquibase Secure, adds policy checks, drift detection, and compliance reporting for enterprises in regulated industries like banking and insurance.
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.
Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that lets organizations store, analyze, and share data across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud without managing infrastructure. Founded in 2012 by three former data architects, it separated compute from storage to make large-scale analytics elastic and pay-per-use. Now positioned as an 'AI Data Cloud,' the company adds managed AI services through Snowflake Cortex and governed agentic tools, serving more than 12,000 customers worldwide.
Firebolt is a cloud data warehouse company building a low-latency, high-concurrency analytical database for engineers building data-intensive and AI applications. Founded in 2019 by former Sisense leaders, it decouples storage and compute to deliver sub-second SQL queries over terabyte- and petabyte-scale datasets, positioning itself on price-performance against Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and ClickHouse. Firebolt has raised roughly $269 million and reached a $1.4 billion valuation as a unicorn.
InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB, the open source time series database purpose-built for high-volume, timestamped data from sensors, applications, infrastructure, and IoT devices. Founded in 2012 and led by CEO Evan Kaplan and founder/CTO Paul Dix, InfluxData rebuilt its engine in Rust on the Apache Arrow, DataFusion, Flight, and Parquet stack for InfluxDB 3. The platform is used by more than 1,900 paying customers - including Tesla, IBM, Cisco, PayPal, and Nordstrom - to collect, store, and analyze real-time data at scale.
Mage is a San Francisco Bay Area software company that builds an open-source and enterprise data pipeline platform for integrating, transforming, and orchestrating data. Founded in 2020 by former Airbnb engineer Tommy Dang, Mage offers a notebook-style, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow, letting teams build batch and streaming pipelines in Python, SQL, and R. Its managed Mage Pro tier adds enterprise orchestration, collaboration, and AI-assisted authoring that generates, debugs, and refactors pipeline code from natural language.
Deepnote is a cloud-based, collaborative data notebook that reimagines the Jupyter notebook for teams. Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, it lets data scientists and analysts connect data sources, write Python, SQL and R, and work together in real time - like a Google Docs for data. In recent years it has leaned heavily into AI, adding an agent that can generate, edit and debug entire notebooks, and it went open source in 2025.
DeltaStream is a Menlo Park-based company building a unified, serverless stream processing platform on top of Apache Flink. Founded in 2021 by Hojjat Jafarpour, the creator of ksqlDB, it lets teams build real-time streaming applications and pipelines using SQL - without wrestling with Flink's operational complexity. Its Fusion platform combines streaming, real-time, and batch analytics into a single serverless experience, integrating with Kafka, Kinesis, Snowflake, Databricks, and Apache Iceberg. The company has raised $25M total, backed by NEA, Galaxy Interactive, and Sanabil.
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.
Enki is a San Francisco-based edtech company building an AI-powered coaching platform that helps professionals and teams learn coding, data, and no-code tools faster. Founded in 2019 by Kirill Makharinsky and Bruno Marnette, Enki pairs on-demand 1:1 AI coaching with structured, role-specific exercises for tools like SQL, Python, Excel, Tableau, Looker, and Power BI. It began as a mobile app that grew to millions of users and 20,000+ five-star reviews, then pivoted toward enterprise upskilling, offering companies a way to raise data literacy and tool adoption across their workforce.
Roe AI builds agentic AI that investigates fraud, disputes, and anti-money-laundering (AML) cases end to end - reading documents, images, websites, and structured data to produce cited evidence and audit-ready dispositions. Founded in 2024 by ex-Snowflake and ex-Meta engineers and backed by Gradient Ventures and Y Combinator, the company started as an AI-powered data warehouse for querying unstructured data with SQL and sharpened into a financial-crime investigation platform used by teams at Affirm, eBay, and a Global Systemically Important Bank.
MindsDB is an open-source AI data platform that lets developers connect, unify, and query structured and unstructured data across 200+ sources using SQL and natural language - turning any database into an AI-ready system without moving data.
Richard Meng is the co-founder and CEO of Roe AI, a Y Combinator-backed (W24) startup building an AI-powered data warehouse that lets data teams query unstructured, multimodal data - documents, images, web pages, video - with plain SQL. A UC Berkeley CS and Statistics double major, he previously led generative AI engineering at Snowflake and worked on the Skills and Knowledge Graph products at LinkedIn before founding Roe AI in 2023 to solve a problem that nagged him for a decade: the 80% of enterprise data that never gets used because it isn't in neat rows and columns.
PostHog is an all-in-one, open-source developer platform that bundles product analytics, web analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, experiments, surveys, error tracking, a customer data platform, and a data warehouse into a single stack engineers can self-host or run in the cloud. Founded in 2020 by James Hawkins and Tim Glaser through Y Combinator, it lets product engineers track usage, ship features, and keep customer data in one place rather than stitching together a dozen SaaS tools. The company reached unicorn status in 2025 with a $75M Series E at a $1.4B valuation.
ClickHouse is the open-source columnar database engineered for real-time analytics on petabyte-scale data. Born inside Yandex in 2009 and spun out as ClickHouse, Inc. in 2021, it now powers analytics for Anthropic, Tesla, Sony, Meta, Lyft, and roughly 3,000 other paying customers as a managed cloud service.
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.
Gian Merlino is the co-founder and CTO of Imply, the company commercializing Apache Druid - the open-source real-time analytics database he co-created while at Metamarkets. A Caltech computer science graduate with roots at Yahoo, Merlino has over 1,000 commits to Apache Druid and served as the project's inaugural PMC chair. Imply reached unicorn status in May 2022 with a $100M Series D, bringing total funding to $215M. Based in San Francisco, Merlino is a recognized expert in operational analytics, real-time data infrastructure, and the convergence of batch and streaming architectures.
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.
Prophecy is an AI-powered data engineering platform that turns visual workflows into production-grade Spark and SQL code, letting analysts and engineers build, deploy, and govern pipelines together on Databricks, Snowflake, and BigQuery.
Tommy Dang is the co-founder and CEO of Mage, an open-source data pipeline and orchestration platform he founded in December 2020 after five years at Airbnb, where he built the Experiences product and a low-code internal tool called Omni used by over 1,000 employees. Mage has raised $11.8M across two seed rounds and grown to 8,700+ GitHub stars, positioning itself as a modern, developer-friendly alternative to Apache Airflow for building, running, and managing data pipelines at scale.

Andy Grove is the original creator of Apache DataFusion and a PMC member of Apache Arrow and Apache DataFusion. With over 30 years of software engineering experience, he specializes in query engines and distributed systems, currently serving as Principal Distributed Database Engineer at Apple. He's the author of 'How Query Engines Work' and creator of sqlparser-rs, one of the leading open-source SQL parsers for Rust. His open-source contributions have shaped the modern data processing ecosystem, with DataFusion powering hundreds of data-centric applications worldwide.

Jess Ramos is a data analytics educator, LinkedIn Top Voice, and founder of Big Data Energy - a media and education brand with 500,000+ followers across platforms. With an MSBA from the University of Georgia, she turned a corporate analytics career (peaking at $153K at Crunchbase) into a thriving solo business after being laid off in 2023. She runs a Substack newsletter with 45,000+ subscribers, teaches SQL to 50,000+ students via LinkedIn Learning, and has brand partnerships with IBM, AWS, Snowflake, NFL, and Claude (Anthropic). Her origin story - doubling her salary 110% in 11 months - became a viral moment that built her community of data professionals seeking real, human-centric career guidance.