# Will Manning

> Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.

- **Role:** Co-founder & CEO at Spiral
- **Organizations:** Spiral, Vortex (Linux Foundation), Palantir, Citadel, Princeton University
- **Education:** Research in Bayesian Nonparametrics and Reinforcement Learning, Princeton University
- **Known for:** Co-created and scaled Palantir Foundry over a near-decade tenure, Created Vortex, a columnar file format delivering ~200x faster random-access reads and GPU-native decompression, donated to the Linux Foundation, Chairs the Vortex Technical Steering Committee at the LF AI & Data Foundation

## Career timeline

- **2009-2011** — Early AI researcher at Princeton, working on Bayesian Nonparametrics and Reinforcement Learning
- **early career** — Worked as a derivatives quant in finance (associated with Citadel)
- **2013-2022** — Nearly a decade at Palantir; co-created and scaled Foundry, established European commercial operations, ran every engineering team that read or wrote bytes
- **2025-08** — Vortex, the columnar file format he created, donated to the Linux Foundation; Manning becomes TSC Chair
- **2025-09** — Spiral launches from stealth with $22M in seed and Series A funding from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst
- **2025-10** — Speaks at Carnegie Mellon Database Seminar: 'Vortex: LLVM for File Formats'

## Achievements

- Co-created and scaled Palantir Foundry over a near-decade tenure
- Created Vortex, a columnar file format delivering ~200x faster random-access reads and GPU-native decompression, donated to the Linux Foundation
- Chairs the Vortex Technical Steering Committee at the LF AI & Data Foundation
- Co-founded Spiral and raised $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst
- Secured backing for Vortex from Microsoft, Snowflake, and Palantir

## Latest updates

- **2025-08** — Vortex donated to the Linux Foundation; Manning named TSC Chair
- **2025-09** — Spiral emerges from stealth with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst
- **2025-10** — Delivers 'Vortex: LLVM for File Formats' talk at Carnegie Mellon
- **2026-01** — Publishes writing on Conway's law and cross-hatching; slated to speak at OpenXData 2026

## Links

- Website: https://willmanning.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-manning-maker-of-things/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/willmanning
- GitHub: https://github.com/lwwmanning

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/will-manning
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-04