Our story
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
CEO / Co-Founder
Lalith is a computer scientist specializing in cloud computing, distributed systems, and networking. Prior to Feldera, he was a senior researcher at VMware Research, where he led a multi-year research agenda to make cluster managers more scalable, flexible and reliable using modern database techniques and formal methods. He holds a PhD. in computer science from TU-Berlin.
Leonid Ryzhyk
CTO / Co-Founder
Leonid holds a PhD. in computer science from the University of New South Wales. Before co-founding Feldera he worked as a researcher at NICTA, University of Toronto, Carnegie Mellon University, Samsung Research America, and most recently at VMware. Leonid has published dozens of research papers on operating systems, programming languages, formal verification, software-defined networks, and databases.
Mihai Budiu
Chief Scientist / Co-Founder
Mihai has a PhD. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously at VMware Research, Barefoot Networks, and Microsoft Research. Mihai has worked on reconfigurable hardware, computer architecture, compilers, security, distributed systems, big data platforms, large-scale machine learning, programmable networks and P4, data visualization, and databases; four of his papers have received “test of time” awards.
Ben Pfaff
Chief Engineer / Co-Founder
Ben's focus is operating systems and networking and distributed systems. As a founding engineer at Nicira Networks and then at VMware, he is best known as the founder and long-time lead developer of Open vSwitch and OVN. Ben has over 25 years of free and open source software experience and has a computer science PhD. from Stanford University.
Gerd Zellweger
Head of Engineering / Co-Founder
Gerd is a systems researcher with expertise in operating systems, low-level hardware and software interaction, concurrency, and networks. He has a PhD. from ETH Zurich and worked at VMware Research before Feldera, where he led the research effort for a new and scalable OS. He has published many papers and patents, his work has won two best paper awards.
George Bullakh
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
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
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
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
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 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.
Work with us
We are combining the latest results in the theory of data processing with modern cloud computing technologies. Building a successful analytics platform from first principles is an extraordinary feat that requires an extraordinary team. Be a part of this team and let's change the world together at workwithus@feldera.com.
