Datacast

Vinoth Chandar is the creator and PMC chair of the Apache Hudi project, a seasoned distributed systems/database engineer, and a dedicated entrepreneur. He has deep experience with databases, distributed systems, and data systems at the planet scale, strengthened through his work at Oracle, Linkedin, Uber, and Confluent.

During his time at Uber, he created Hudi, which pioneered transactional data lakes as we know them today, to solve unique speed and scale needs for Uber’s massive data platform. Most recently, Vinoth founded Onehouse - a cloud-native managed lakehouse to make data lakes easier, faster, and cheaper.

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a Revenue Data platform that is purpose-built for GTM teams to analyze, visualize, and action data about their prospects and customers without needing engineers.

Alexa’s passion for Product-Led Sales started when she led sales strategy & operations at Dataminr, where she built internal solutions to equip sales teams with data. She studied engineering at Vanderbilt University and received her MBA from Stanford University.

Carlos Aguilar is the Founder and CEO of Glean, a data visualization company based in New York City.

He grew up in Washington, DC, where he started tinkering with robots and websites early on and fell in love with the intersection of art and technology. At Cornell, he studied Mechanical Engineering and robotics and did research in machine learning applications in robotics and art. In 2009, he joined an early robotics startup called Kiva Systems, where he got deep into data and analytics.

After Kiva was acquired by Amazon, Carlos joined Flatiron Health and worked on data products to help cancer centers and cancer researchers. As the head of the Data Insights team, Carlos grew the team to 25 people who helped launch dozens of data products and supported Flatiron's core data infrastructure.

Shruti Bhat leads product management and marketing at Rockset. Before Rockset, she led Product Management for Oracle Cloud, focusing on AI, IoT, and Blockchain. Previously, she was the VP of Marketing at Ravello Systems, where she drove the start-up's rapid growth from pre-launch to hundreds of customers and a successful acquisition. Before that, she was responsible for launching VMware's vSAN and led engineering teams at HP and IBM. Shruti has a bachelor's in computer science engineering and an MBA from UCLA Anderson.

Arjun Narayan is the co-founder and CEO of Materialize. Materialize is a streaming database for real-time applications and analytics, built on top of a next-generation stream processor – Timely Dataflow. He was previously an engineer at Cockroach Labs and held a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Doris Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Ponder, a startup delivering scalable, enterprise-ready pandas that improve the productivity of data teams. She graduated with her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley RISE Lab in 2021, where she developed data science tools to accelerate insight discovery.

Chris Riccomini is an engineer, author, investor, and advisor. He has worked on infrastructure as an engineer and manager for about 15 years at PayPal, LinkedIn, and WePay. He was involved in open source as the original author of Apache Samza and an early contributor to Apache Airflow. He has also written a book with Dmitriy Ryaboy called The Missing README, a guide for software engineers. Lately, he has been investing in startups in the data space.

Nnamdi Iregbulem, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, is a self-taught programmer and lifelong technology nerd. His mission is to increase total software output by supporting entrepreneurs building technical tools for technical people. He focuses on investments in technical enterprise software such as developer tools, application infrastructure, and machine learning.

Tom Rikert is the co-founder and CEO of Masterful AI, the training platform for computer vision that helps developers build models faster and with much less labeling. He is a former VC and invested in enterprise software and AI/ML at Andreessen Horowitz. Before VC, he held product management roles at Wildfire (acquired by Google), YouTube, and Autodesk. He began his AI/ML journey at MIT and started his career as an engineer at Silicon Graphics. Tom lives in the Bay Area with his wife and daughter and loves going fast, whether on a mountain bike or flying racing drones.

Grace Isford is a Partner based in Lux Capital's New York City office. She invests in companies innovating at the nexus of the computational sciences – data, AI and ML infrastructure, network and compute infrastructure, and cutting-edge technological applications, especially in healthcare and financial services. She focuses on data and machine-learning startups that are hyper-personalizing user experiences and transforming legacy industries, as well as fintech and blockchain infrastructure companies building the next-gen developer stack and payment rails.