Ali Azhar

3 weeks ago | bigdatawire.com | Ali Azhar

DuckDB, the creators of the embedded analytics engine of the same name, have stirred the data world with a bold rethink of lakehouse architecture. The company has unveiled DuckLake, a new open table format designed to simplify lakehouses by using a standard SQL database for all metadata. Instead of following the current trend of layering JSON and Avro metadata files on blob storage, DuckLake consolidates all metadata into a standard SQL database.

3 weeks ago | bigdatawire.com | Ali Azhar

As enterprise GenAI adoption continues to surge, another equally transformative, but often less visible shift is happening – the rise of predictable AI built on structured data. While much of the recent innovation has focused on unstructured data, like visual AI and chatbots, structured data remains the backbone of business operations. Emerging in this rapidly evolving space is Silicon Valley startup Kumo – a platform that offers AI models for relationship data.

3 weeks ago | bigdatawire.com | Ali Azhar

LandingAI, the visual AI company founded by Andrew Ng, recently made two major product developments: a partnership with Snowflake Cortex AI to bring real-time visual inspection to automotive manufacturers and upgrades to its agentic document extraction (ADE) system, which is built to surpass legacy tools and extract insights from even the most complex unstructured documents.

4 weeks ago | bigdatawire.com | Ali Azhar

ClickHouse, known for its high-performance columnar database technology, has secured $350 million in Series C funding to address the growing demand for real-time and scalable analytics in the AI era. In a market where traditional databases are buckling under AI-native workloads, the new funding could be exactly what ClickHouse needs to capitalize on its architecture’s speed and scalability advantage.

1 month ago | bigdatawire.com | Ali Azhar

Hex, an AI-driven data science and analytics startup, has secured $70 million in a Series C funding round. In a data space crowded with dashboards, notebooks, and business intelligence (BI) tools, Hex is betting the future belongs to unified and AI-native platforms. The company plans to use the funds not only to add more AI capabilities but also to advance a more ambitious goal of replacing fragmented and outdated analytics stacks that often lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.