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. Determined to address

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

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 Odesа Polytechnic National University. He has diverse experience working with automotive HMI systems, Triple-A videogames, blockchain and web apps.

Simon Kassing

Simon Kassing

Engineer

Simon is a systems engineer and researcher. He has a PhD. in computer science from ETH Zurich. He specializes in improving the performance, resilience, analyzability and efficiency of networked systems.

Abhinav Gyawali

Abhinav Gyawali

Engineer

Abhinav is currently a senior year undergraduate student at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, Nepal, studying Computer Science. His interests primarily lie in developing compilers and databases.

Rivu Adhikari

Rivu Adhikari

Engineer

Rivu is pursuing her undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Tribhuvan University. She enjoys writing poetry and is learning about Machine Learning and App Development.

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.