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Our story

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Feldera was born from a shared vision among a group of researchers who, since 2018, have been deeply entrenched in the challenges of incremental computation. Across various fields—ranging from data infrastructure to security products—we saw a recurring pattern: ad-hoc solutions were repeatedly crafted to tackle what were fundamentally incremental computation problems. These solutions were almost always brittle, hard to maintain, performed poorly, and crippled product velocity.

"Our technology has been running in production at VMware since 2021..."

Determined to address this, we teamed up to advance the state-of-the-art and state-of-practice for robust incremental computation. Our technology has been running in production at VMware since 2021. That experience in turn led to DBSP, our award-winning research on incremental computation for query languages like SQL. Inspired by these successes, we founded Feldera to democratize this technology and help engineers solve the toughest data problems without being held back by the limitations of legacy compute infrastructure.

Meet our Team

Lalith Suresh

Lalith Suresh

CEO / Co-Founder

Lalith has spent over a decade building large-scale distributed systems for the cloud. Before co-founding Feldera, he was a senior researcher at VMware, where he led efforts to reimagine cluster management using database-inspired techniques and formal methods. He holds a PhD from TU Berlin.

Leonid Ryzhyk

Leonid Ryzhyk

CTO / Co-Founder

Leonid is a systems builder with experience spanning database internals, OS kernels, compilers, networking and formal methods. He is a co-creator of DBSP, Feldera’s core engine. Before Feldera, he worked at VMware, Samsung Research, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Toronto, and NICTA. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales.

Mihai Budiu

Mihai Budiu

Chief Scientist / Co-Founder

Mihai has designed and built high-performance systems across Big Data platforms, distributed systems, compilers, machine learning, network infrastructure and reconfigurable hardware. He is a co-creator of DBSP, Feldera’s core engine. Four of his papers have won “test of time” awards. He previously worked at VMware, Barefoot Networks, and Microsoft. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ben Pfaff

Ben Pfaff

Chief Engineer / Co-Founder

Ben is a veteran systems engineer working on operating systems and distributed systems. Before Feldera, he worked at Nicira Networks as a founding engineer and then at VMware. He is best known as the founder and long-time lead developer of Open vSwitch and OVN, and has 25 years of free and open source software experience. He holds a PhD from Stanford University.

Gerd Zellweger

Gerd Zellweger

Head of Engineering / Co-Founder

Gerd is a systems builder specializing in operating systems, concurrency, networks, and hardware-software interaction. Before Feldera, he led scalable multi-core OS design efforts at VMware and ETH Zurich. He has won two best paper awards. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich.

George Bulakh

George Bulakh

Engineer

George is a full-stack software engineer who holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Odesa Polytechnic National University. He has diverse experience working with automotive HMI systems, Triple-A videogames, blockchain and web apps.

Swanand Mulay

Swanand Mulay

Engineer

Swanand is an engineer from India with a hacker’s mindset and a talent for building software and systems. If he’s gone quiet on sharing memes, then he’s probably off in mountains or some adventure. Legend says he still can’t write a good bio for himself.

Tristen Cross

Tristen Cross

Founding Product Marketing Manager

Tristen Cross has been in product marketing for over 10 years. She’s been the founding product marketer at four startups, building positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy at companies like Hopin, CloudBees, and Anomalo - with a brief detour to co-found a natural foods company, because you only live once.

Anand Raman

Anand Raman

Founding Forward Deployed Engineer

Anand is an engineer who helps Feldera’s customers architect and scale their data processing pipelines. His background includes data engineering, data orchestration, and cloud solution architecture. He enjoys working with customers across industries, from startups to large enterprises, to define creative solutions to difficult data challenges.

Jyotshna Yaparla

Jyotshna Yaparla

DevOps Infrastructure Engineer

Jyotshna is a DevOps and infrastructure engineer focused on keeping Feldera’s engineering systems running smoothly. Her work spans CI/CD pipeline automation, Kubernetes cluster management, cloud infrastructure, release engineering, and Kafka integrations. She holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science.

Jason Mueller

Jason Mueller

Head of Sales

Jason Mueller is building Feldera’s go-to-market team. With over 15 years of experience leading sales at high-growth startups - including Snowflake (in the early days), Opaque Systems, and Spectro Cloud - he knows what it takes to bring technically complex products to market and earn the trust of engineers and technical leaders. Jason leads with empathy and works shoulder-to-shoulder with his team. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and three kids.

Emily Anderson

Emily Anderson

Head of Operations

Emily Anderson is building the systems and structures that let Feldera scale. Her background spans operations and marketing in early-stage startups and global enterprises, including Microsoft and Booking.com. She has a bias toward systems thinking and a belief that the best operations work is invisible: when it’s done right, everyone else just gets to move faster. Emily lives in the Bay Area with her family and is equally at home in a kitchen or on a golf course.

Xavier Bestel

Xavier Bestel

Backend Infrastructure Engineer

Xavier is a systems engineer with almost three decades of experience making low-level code fast and robust. He has built compilers and formal verification tools at STMicroelectronics and Mentor Graphics, ported Linux to custom ARM silicon for VoIP hardware, architected France’s nationwide legal time synchronization network at Gorgy Timing, squeezed voice recognition models onto Sonos speakers, and moved a high-frequency trading engine to io_uring and a unikernel. He co-founded a VoIP startup along the way. At Feldera he works on connectors and platform infrastructure, in Rust. He lives near Grenoble, in a small village high in the French Alps, and he enjoys that very much.

Song Huang

Song Huang

Software Engineer

Song is a software engineer with an interest in databases and data infrastructure. After getting tired of teams hacking together solutions using Spark, Flink, Snowflake, and ClickHouse, he realized there had to be a better way and set off to build it with Feldera. He also loves solo traveling, history, and cooking, and struggles with the idea of writing in third person and having photos of himself on the internet. Occasionally practices the arcane art of writing code, and even more rarely, reading code.

Meet our investors

Costanoa

Costanoa

At Costanoa, we back entrepreneurs who are a lot like us: hungry, thoughtful, tenacious and looking to solve big problems. We specialize in enterprise and fintech, and that focus has given us experience and expertise to be exceptionally helpful to founders building in those markets. We lead at Seed and Series A. We want to be your first call to both cheer you on when the good stuff happens and help tackle challenges when they come up (and they will!) We will be your advocate through the ups and downs of your journey.

Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica

Ion Stoica is a Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Director of SkyLab. He also co-founded three companies, Anyscale (2019), Databricks (2013) and Conviva (2006). He is currently doing research on cloud computing and AI systems. Past work includes Ray, Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Tachyon, Chord DHT, and Dynamic Packet State (DPS). He is an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy, an ACM Fellow and has received numerous awards, including the Mark Weiser Award (2019), SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award (2015), and several Test of Time awards.