20 Things You Didn’t Know About Voltron Data

Voltron Data believes in building more bridges across the data science and analytics industry to accelerate the efficient development of data tools. Here are some 20 interesting things you might not know about Voltron Data.

20. Voltron Data is accelerating standards in data analytics

Voltron Data is focused on making the data science ecosystem more efficient with modular and composable analytics building blocks. Modularity and composability help the company build bridges—not walls—across the analytics ecosystem. The company is committed to developing open source standards for data so organizations can interchange and process massive datasets between the applications and tools they already use and love.

19. Voltron Data launched earlier this year with $110 million in seed and Series A funding

Voltron Data had a $22 million seed round and an oversubscribed $88 million Series A funding round. Investors include Battery, BlackRock, GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and The Factory. The company already had 100 employees across 20+ countries when they launched.

18. Voltron Data is focused on building one of the most diverse teams in tech

Diversity, equity and inclusion are a core part of the company’s DNA. When the company launched earlier this year, half of the employees were based in the US and of those, 20% were African American, 15% Hispanic, 15% Asian and roughly 20% women. As the company grows, they are committed to increasing diversity across the company.

17. Voltron Data has a world-class leadership team:

• Josh Patterson, co-founder, CEO and Board President, was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, created the RAPIDS ecosystem at NVIDIA and built cyber defense platforms at Accenture Labs. He also spent time in financial services developing prepayment, default and severity models at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
• Wes McKinney, co-founder and CTO, co-created Apache Arrow, created the Python pandas project which helped Python become a mainstream language for data science, machine learning and AI and co-created Ibis. He was also co-founder of DataPad (acquired by Cloudera), Ursa Labs and Ursa Computing
• Rodrigo Aramburú, co-founder and COO, was the CEO for BlazingSQL, the first fully open source distributed GPU-accelerated SQL engine. Before BlazingSQL, he worked at Deloitte on large-scale analytics projects for the financial services industry and US government agencies
• Darren Haas, co-founder and CBO, has held leadership roles at some of the world’s most respected companies, like Amazon, GE and Apple where he was on the Siri founding team. He spent time as an entrepreneur in residence for the AI department at SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute)

16. Ursa Computing and BlazingSQL teams joined forces with pioneers of NVIDIA RAPIDS to found Voltron Data

Voltron Data’s executives and former engineering leadership from Ursa Computing, NVIDIA RAPIDS and BlazingSQL co-founded Voltron Data in 2021 to build Arrow-native software that improves efficiency, performance and interoperability at all scales of computing. Voltron Data is becoming the cornerstone of data analytics for the next decade and beyond.

15. Voltron Data’s co-founder Darren Haas is a serial entrepreneur

In addition to being on the founding team of Siri, Darren founded several companies, including Change.org, Imoji (now part of Giphy) and The Flat Stanley Project.

14. Voltron Data is hiring

Voltron Data is hiring for teams across engineering, business development and operations. As a fully remote company, they offer payroll and benefits in more than 150 countries and unlimited PTO.

13. Voltron Data is the largest corporate contributor to Apache Arrow

Apache Arrow is a leading open source computing framework that has become the de facto standard for accelerating analytical processing and data access. Arrow has more than 67 monthly downloads and has been adopted globally by well-known companies like AWS, Databricks, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and Snowflake.

12. Voltron Data is working with Apache Arrow for data management purposes

A data management system, Apache Arrow is a cross-language development library that provides fast in-memory columnar storage for large datasets. Apache Arrow serves as the foundation for which additional tooling and libraries will be built around in the pursuit of more efficient data transfer.

11. Voltron Data is a major contributor to Substrait

Substrait seeks to create a cross-language, interoperable specification for data compute operations, connecting analysis tools with computing engines and hardware. It provides a standard, flexible way for APIs and compute engines to share the representation of analytics computations.

10. Voltron Data is a major contributor to Ibis

Ibis is an open source Python framework for accessing data and performing analytical computations using multiple backends, including SQL databases like Postgres and MySQL and big data systems like Google’s BigQuery. Ibis now has more than 500,000 monthly downloads and is used by companies like Google, Heavy.AI and Microsoft today.

9. Voltron Data offers free and paid for enterprise support offerings for open source products

Voltron Data offers Free, Dev and Pro Edition subscriptions for Apache Arrow and Ibis today that include on-demand support.

8. Voltron Data supports the enterprise adoption of data standards to reduce complexity while improving performance and efficiency.

Voltron Data provides enterprise support for the adoption of standards in order to accelerate improvements while giving executives peace of mind. As a result, developers can write in the language they prefer, teams can use the tools they love, and organizations are more adaptable and nimble.

7. Voltron Data’s co-founder and CTO Wes McKinney wrote the book Python for Data Analysis

Originally published in 2011, Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy and IPython has become a key resource for those in the data analytics space. The updated 3rd edition will be available in late 2022.

6. Voltron Data employs a collection of open source maintainers

In addition to Wes McKinney, members of their engineering team have been driving open source ecosystems for more than 15 years particularly in the C++, Python and R programming languages.

5. Voltron Data is focused on supporting developers and recently added Marlene Mhangami and Danielle Navarro to their developer advocate team.

As significant contributors to the Apache Arrow open source project, the Voltron Data team, including Marlene and Danielle, wants to support tools, approaches and communities that build bridges across the data science and analytics ecosystem. They each bring tremendous experience, knowledge and compassion for developing open source data science tools while enabling developers and users to get the most from data toolkits and to accelerate data analysis pipelines.

4. Voltron Data sponsors a major industry event called The Data Thread

In June 2022, Voltron Data launched The Data Thread, a free conference dedicated to the Apache Arrow community and related projects. The event was a mix of more than 40 live and pre-recorded sessions around the theme: Connecting Data, Scaling Communities. The next edition of The Data Thread is scheduled for early 2023.

3. At The Data Thread, Voltron Data and DataStax announced a partnership

Voltron Data and DataStax are partnering to strengthen interoperability with Arrow and DataStax’s enterprise products in order to improve the quality of real-time data intelligence as well as reduce the time to insights.

2. At The Data Thread, Voltron Data announced commitment to tighten interoperability between Apache Arrow and the Velox Open Source Project created by Meta.

Tightening the collaboration and interoperability with the Apache Arrow ecosystem not only simplifies the integration of Velox with different data management systems, but it is also a major step towards making these systems more modular and future-proof. Composability is the future of database systems.

1. Voltron Data envisions an Arrow-native future

The company is working towards a future in which widely adopted open standards enable frictionless interoperability across the data analytics ecosystem, complex data architectures can be simplified as technologies converge, and data access is fast and efficient.

Conclusion

Voltron Data is a fast growing company that is focusing on making the data science ecosystem more efficient with modular and composable analytics. They provide enterprise support for the adoption of standards in order to accelerate improvements while giving executives peace of mind and enabling organizations to be more adaptable and nimble.