vector-database
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Chang She
Chang She is the co-founder and CEO of LanceDB, the company behind the open-source Lance columnar format and a database built for multimodal AI. A co-author of the pandas library alongside Wes McKinney, he spent nearly two decades building data tooling - from quant research at AQR to the DataPad startup (acquired by Cloudera) to VP of Engineering at Tubi - before setting out to replace the aging Parquet-and-Spark stack with what he calls the Multimodal Lakehouse. In June 2025 LanceDB raised a $30M Series A led by Theory Ventures, with adoption at Runway, Midjourney, and Character.ai.
Issac Roth
Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.
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.
Daniel Svonava
Daniel Svonava is the Co-Founder and CEO of Superlinked, an ML infrastructure company building self-hosted inference infrastructure for vector search and document processing. A Slovak-born engineer and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, he spent six years as an ML Tech Lead at YouTube building ad performance systems powering over $10B in annual ad revenue before co-founding Superlinked in 2021. Superlinked raised a $9.5M seed round led by Index Ventures in March 2024, and the company is on a mission to make vector-based retrieval accessible and production-ready for enterprises.
Jerry Liu
Jerry Liu is the co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, the open-source data framework that became essential infrastructure for connecting large language models to enterprise data. What started as a weekend side project in November 2022 - an indexing tool he built to feed his own data into GPT-3 - grew into a company with $46.5M in total funding, 600,000+ monthly downloads, and clients including Salesforce, KPMG, and Carlyle. A Princeton computer science graduate who published GAN research as an undergrad, Liu moved from Quora's feed ranking team to Uber's autonomous vehicle research labs before co-founding LlamaIndex with former Uber colleague Simon Suo in early 2023.