Grows technical leadership team with three key co-founders from Alibaba, Uber and Walmart running major Presto deployments
Ahana, the self-service analytics company for Presto, announced an additional investment of $2.3 million in seed financing led by new investor Lux Capital, along with participation from existing investor GV (formerly Google Ventures), bringing total funds raised to $4.8 million. Ahana has also expanded its technical team with three new co-founders adding top Presto and core database talent from Alibaba, Uber and Walmart, each responsible for running major Presto deployments.
The seed extension comes just three months after Ahana announced its commitment to grow the Presto community and deliver Presto-based analytics products. Today, in a separate announcement, Ahana unveiled Ahana Cloud for Presto. Previously, Ahana had made available the completely open source PrestoDB Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on the AWS Marketplace as well as a PrestoDB container on DockerHub to support the community.
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Joining Cofounder and CEO Steven Mih; Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Dipti Borkar; and Cofounder and CTO David Simmen, the Ahana team now includes:
- Vivek Bharathan, Cofounder, Principal Software Engineer and Presto Contributor – Most recently, Vivek was a Software Engineer at Uber where he managed Presto clusters with more than 2,500 nodes, processing 35PB of data per day, and worked on extending Presto to support Uber’s interactive analytics needs. Prior to Uber, Vivek was an early member of the query-optimizer team at Vertica Systems and made several contributions to the core database engine and the Vertica ecosystem. His Presto contributions include the Presto support of partial aggregations.
- Ashish Tadose, Cofounder, Principal Software Engineer and Presto Contributor – Ashish joins Ahana from WalmartLabs, where he was a Principal Engineer and built a multi-cloud Data Acceleration Service powered by Presto while leading and architecting other products related to data discovery, federated query engines, and data governance. Ashish is also an Apache committer and contributor to several open source projects.
- George Wang, Cofounder, Principal Software Engineer and Presto Contributor – With more than 13 years of experience as a core database engineer, George joins Ahana from Alibaba where he built numerous key features, including dynamic partition pruning, to support a high throughput and low-latency engine for AnalyticDB, a Presto-based cloud service. He was also a member of the Presto Foundation Outreach Committee while at Alibaba. Prior to that, George was a Staff Software Engineer at IBM for over 10 years where he developed multiple features and enhancements on DB2 for z/OS.
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“Presto is one of the fastest growing database engines, as users find it has unparalleled performance for interactive, ad hoc querying,” said Steven Mih, Cofounder and CEO, Ahana. “Since exiting stealth, we’ve accelerated momentum across the company by making significant contributions to the Presto community; building a world-class technical team of core database engineers who have run Presto deployments with over 1,000 nodes at some of the world’s most data-intensive companies; and unveiling Ahana Cloud for Presto, the first Presto-as-a-service offering. The strong investor interest we received at a step-up multiple in valuation is validation of the work we are doing. The additional funds will be used to continue expanding development, contributing to Presto open source, and hiring more engineers.”
“With data spread across many sources, particularly data lakes, a federated SQL approach is replacing the traditional data warehouse model and Presto is poised to become the new SQL query engine of choice for running across data stores,” said Brandon Reeves, Principal, Lux Capital. “Ahana is the only company to make Presto ubiquitously available via unrivaled ease of use and affordability with its managed service model, and, combined with their stellar team having deep Presto and database experience, we believe they are positioned to make a major impact on the market.”
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