About Us
Ahana, the only SaaS for Presto, offers the only managed service for Presto on AWS with the vision to simplify open data lake analytics. Presto, the open source project created by Facebook and used at Uber, Twitter and thousands more, is the de facto standard for fast SQL processing on data lakes. Ahana Cloud delivers the easiest Presto SaaS and enables data platform teams to provide high performance SQL analytics on their S3 data lakes and other data sources.
As a leading member of the Presto community and Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation, Ahana is also focused on fostering growth and evangelizing open source Presto. Founded in 2020, Ahana is headquartered in San Mateo, CA and operates as an all-remote company.
Check out all of our company awards!
Ahana is a Premier Member
Leadership
Steven Mih
Co-Founder & CEO
Go-to-Market Leader. Experienced in growing startups. Ardent fan of open source, distributed systems, and yoga. Presto Foundation Board Member. Former CEO of Alluxio and Aviatrix. Started out as a Field Sales Engineer at AMD.
David E. Simmen
Co-Founder & CTO
Database, data federation and advanced analytics pioneer. Began career as a carpenter, Local 230 in Pittsburgh. Former Splunk Fellow & Chief Architect and Teradata Fellow. Started out as a member of senior technical staff at IBM working on innovations for DB2.
Ali LeClerc
Head of Marketing & Community
Over a decade of experience in open source software, product, and community marketing. Former marketing at Alluxio, Couchbase, Time Warner. Holds B.A. from Yale University.
Vivek Bharathan
Co-Founder & Principal Software Engineer
Passionate about big data, distributed systems, and analytic databases. 10+ years as a core database engineer. Former software engineer at Uber managing Presto clusters with > 2,500 nodes, processing 35PB of data per day, Early member of the query-optimizer team at Vertica Systems.
George Wang
Co-Founder & Principal Software Engineer
Core database engineer for 13+ years. Presto contributor. Passionate about building OLAP systems. Previously built advanced Presto-based cloud service while at Alibaba. Developed multiple features and enhancements on DB2 for z/OS while at IBM.
Investors
Robert Schwartz
Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures
“Since its launch in June of 2020, Ahana has in a short time established itself as the Presto company, bringing a solution to market that enables any team to use Presto in the cloud for their data lake analytics. Couple that with the momentum we’re seeing in the Presto community, I look forward to even more from the Ahana team as they execute on their vision of the open data lake analytics stack with Presto.”
Dave Munichiello
General Partner, GV
“The data analytics market is evolving, as enterprises look for new opportunities to manage analytical data cost-effectively and at scale. There is a pronounced movement away from expensive, highly-structured data warehouses to ‘data lakes’ of raw data. We see an opportunity in companies who power simple and efficient analysis of this type of raw data and are drawn to Ahana’s vision that leverages the rapidly-growing Presto open source project.”
Brandon Reeves
Principal, Lux Capital
“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. 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.”
Mark Leslie
Managing Director, Leslie Ventures
“There is no doubt that the future of analytics is pre-ordained by the petabyte-scale data companies like Facebook, Uber, and Twitter, who all run large clusters of PrestoDB. As the first PrestoDB company focused on simplifying ad-hoc analytics, Ahana is poised to corner this new gigantic market.”
Ankur Prakash
Partner at Liberty Global Ventures
“Today we’re seeing more companies embrace cloud-based technologies to deliver superior customer experiences. An underlying architectural pattern is the leveraging of an Open Data Lakehouse, a more flexible stack that solves for the high costs, lock-in, and limitations of the traditional data warehouse. Ahana has innovated to address these challenges with its industry-leading approach to bring the most high-performing, cost-effective SQL query engine to data platforms teams. Our investment in Ahana reflects our commitment to drive more value for businesses, specifically in the next evolution of the data warehouse to Open Data Lakehouses.
Board of Directors
Steven Mih
Cofounder and CEO, Ahana
Steven brings over twenty years of experience in sales, business development, and marketing of enterprise technology solutions to Ahana. In addition to his role of CEO, Steven is a Presto Foundation Board Member. Prior to Ahana, Steven was the former CEO of Alluxio and Aviatrix. His multifaceted go-to-market experience spans leading additional organizations including Couchbase, Transitive, and Cadence Design Systems. Steven started his career as a Field Sales Engineer at AMD. Steven holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego.
Robert Schwartz
Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures
Since June 2000, Mr. Schwartz has been Managing Partner of Third Point Ventures, the Menlo Park, California based venture capital arm of Third Point LLC, which is a registered investment adviser based in New York and the investment manager of the Third Point Funds. Mr. Schwartz is presently a director of NextSilicon, Sysdig, CipherTrace, Kentik, Kumu Networks, Aryaka, Upstart (Nasdaq:UPST), Precision Hawk, R2 Semiconductor, Rubicon Labs, SentinelOne (NYSE:S), YellowBrick Data, Ushur, and Catalytic. Previously he led investments in Radia Communications (acquired by Texas Instruments), LitePoint (acquired by Teradyne), Global Locate (Acquired by Broadcom), EnPhase Energy (Nasdaq: ENPH), Apigee (Nasdaq: APIC, Acquired by Alphabet/GOOG), IQ Engines (Acquired by Yahoo!), Elastica (acquired by BlueCoat), Swift Financial (Acquired by PayPal), CloudVelox (acquired by VMWare), and Packet (acquired by Equinix). Robert Schwartz was named to the Annual Always On List Of Top 100 Venture Capitalists. Previously, for 23 years, Mr. Schwartz was the President of RF Associates North, a privately held communications semiconductor manufacturer’s representative firm. Mr. Schwartz holds a multi-discipline engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
Mark Leslie
Managing Director, Leslie Ventures
Mark Leslie is currently the managing director of Leslie Ventures, a private investment company. He is also a Lecturer in Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches courses in Entrepreneurship, Ethics and Sales Organization. Mark Leslie was the founding Chairman and CEO of Veritas Software. During his eleven-year tenure as CEO the company went from 12 employees to 6,000 employees, and from annual revenue of $95,000 to $1,500,000,000. In 2000 Veritas was the tenth largest independent software company by revenue, third largest by market capitalization, and achieved the distinction of becoming a Fortune 1000 company. From 1980 until 1990 he served as president and chief executive officer of two Silicon Valley high-tech startup companies. Prior experience included sales management, sales executive, systems engineer, and software engineer. Mark Leslie architected the first ever software hypervisor while employed at IBM in 1969.
Mark currently serves on the boards of several privately held high-technology corporations, including, Alluxio, Clumio, Interana, StratoScale, Vera and Yellowbrick. Over the last twenty-five years Mark has served on approximate fifty public and private boards of directors.
Mark serves on the NYU Board of Trustees, the Board of Overseers for the NYU Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Board of Overseers of the Tandon Engineering and as a member of the Executive Board of the NYU Innovation Fund. Mark also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of Stanford Health Care (Hospital and Medical School)
Mark received a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and mathematics from New York University in 1966 and completed Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development (PMD) in 1980.
Advisors
“PrestoDB is exploding in popularity with users around the world. That, combined with Ahana’s vision of simplifying the ad-hoc analytics journey for users, is extremely promising. I look forward to working closely with the co-founders Steven Mih and Dipti Borkar as they rejoin the Presto Foundation and community. While various forks of the original PrestoDB project exist, only PrestoDB has true governance, transparency and vendor neutrality authenticated by the Presto Foundation, under the Linux Foundation.”
Bob Wiederhold
Former CEO Couchbase, Tality