Ahana

Ahana is the Presto company that brings together decades of cloud, open source, database and distributed systems experience. Presto, the open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation, is the de-facto open source distributed SQL query engine for data lakes. With Presto, data engineers and analysts can run interactive, ad hoc analytics on large amounts of data, which continues to grow exponentially across a wide range of data lakes and databases. One of the fastest growing projects in the data analytics space, Presto is the same project running at massive scale at Facebook, Uber and Twitter. In 2020, Ahana became the first and only Presto-focused company to bring to market a fully integrated, cloud native Presto managed service for AWS.
Describe what makes the nominated company unique (250 words):
In April 2020, Ahana was founded as the first company focused on bringing Presto ad-hoc analytics offerings to the cloud market. Ahana raised $4.8M in seed funding in the midst of the global pandemic from Google Ventures and Lux Capital, two leading venture companies.
In December 2020, Ahana launched Ahana Cloud for Presto, the industry's first and only cloud-native managed service that makes Presto ubiquitously available via unrivaled ease of use and affordability. As data lakes have become more ubiquitous, Presto has become the de facto query engine for the data lake. Presto is a federated SQL engine, open sourced by Facebook and has become one of the fastest growing projects in the data analytics space.
Ahana has continued to grow its customer base across all verticals in the mid-size and enterprise markets, including companies in the telco, FinServ, AdTech, and security industries, and today there are dozens of companies using Ahana Cloud for Presto on AWS. Recent notable additions and success stories include Securonix, Dialog, Carbon, Rev, Metropolis, Requis, and Cartona.
In August 2021, Ahana raised $20 million in Series A funding to transform open data lake analytics, bringing total funds raised to $24.8 million. The financing round was led by Third Point Ventures and included existing investors GV (formerly Google Ventures), Leslie Ventures, and Lux Capital. Robert Schwartz, Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures will join Ahana’s Board of Directors.
Describe the challenges or adversity the nominee has overcome in the past 12 mos (250 words).
In April 2020, Ahana was founded in the midst of a global pandemic as the first compan