DATAVERSITY
Okera Delivers Unified Fine-Grained Access to Microsoft Azure Data Lakes
Your data can do more.
Innovation is happening faster than ever and it’s essential that data access is given to the people who need it most. Yet, understanding who is using it and how it is being used is always of critical concern.
Executive Team
Nong Li
CEO and Co-founder
Nong founded Okera in 2016 with his co-founder Amandeep Khurana. Prior to Okera, he was on the engineering team at Databricks, where he led performance engineering for Spark core and SparkSQL. Prior to Databricks, Nong was the tech lead for the Impala project at Cloudera and also the author of the Record Service project. Nong is also one of the original authors of the Apache Parquet project and mentors several Apache projects, including Apache Arrow. Nong has a degree in computer science from Brown University.
Amandeep Khurana
CTO and Co-founder
Amandeep founded Okera in 2016 with his co-founder Nong Li. While supporting customer initiatives at Cloudera and involved in product development at AWS, Amandeep witnessed first-hand the challenges companies faced in adopting big data and cloud technologies. This experience, along with the goal to empower people and businesses through easy data access, led him to start Okera.
Amandeep is also the co-author of HBase in Action, a book on building applications on HBase. He is passionate about distributed systems, big data, and helping customers get value out of new technology.
Ravi Ramachandran
Vice President of Sales
Ravi helped establish the Machine Learning Data Catalog category when served as Vice President of Global Sales at Waterline Data. He has previously held leadership positions at CSC, AppLabs, Xchanging, Pegasystems, Scient (Microsoft), and Lewtan (Moody’s Analytics).
Ravi is a big data and analytics industry leader, having led worldwide enterprise sales organizations for some of the industry’s best technology innovators, product leaders, and services companies. His experience extends across big data, data governance, machine learning, and other advanced data and analytics technologies.
Itay Neeman
VP Engineering
Itay joined Okera in early 2019 to lead the product development efforts and build a world-class engineering team. Previously, Itay worked for Splunk in Seattle where he helped to establish and lead the first remote development office growing the team by more than 15x since 2011. At Splunk, he served as both the engineering and site lead for the Seattle office while also personally contributing and leading several major initiatives. These initiatives include work across all parts of Splunk Enterprise, the industry-leading operational intelligence tool, and a new product offering for Splunk’s future cloud initiative.
Prior to Splunk, Itay worked as an engineer at Microsoft working on Midori, the next-generation operating system incubated out of Microsoft Research. Itay has an M.S. from University of Washington and a B.S. from Brown University, both in Computer Science.
Board Members
Ethan Kurzweil
Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
Board Member
Ethan Kurzweil is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners where he invests in developer platforms and consumer tech startups. Ethan has served on the board of leading platform companies including Intercom, PagerDuty, Periscope Data, Applitools, Twitch (acq. by Amazon), and Periscope (acq. by Twitter) and was actively involved in Bessemer’s investments in public companies Twilio and Sendgrid.
Wesley Chan
Managing Partner, Felicis Ventures
Board Member
Wesley Chan is a Managing Director at Felicis Ventures. He has led investment rounds and holds board or observer seats in Canva, CultureAmp, and Dialpad. As an early employee at Google, he founded and launched Google Analytics and Google Voice, which reach tens of millions of users worldwide.
Investors
Investors
News
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