stream-processing
(6)
Yingjun Wu
Yingjun Wu is the founder and CEO of RisingWave Labs, the San Francisco company behind RisingWave, a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed SQL database for stream processing. A database researcher turned entrepreneur, he earned his PhD at the National University of Singapore, was a visiting PhD at Carnegie Mellon under Andy Pavlo, and worked on the AWS Redshift team and at IBM's Almaden Research Center before founding RisingWave in 2021. His goal is to democratize real-time stream processing by making it as simple, affordable, and accessible as writing SQL. The company has raised more than $40 million, including a $36 million Series A.
DeltaStream
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.
RisingWave
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.
Pathway
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.
Confluent
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.
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.