While building Apple’s internal ML data management platform (SIGMOD ‘19), co-founders Yucheng, Ajit, and Rajat noticed that every team experienced the same challenges when experimenting with large scale data.
Seeing the opportunity to have wider impact across multiple industries, they founded XetHub in October 2021 to approach the problem from a new direction. Our vision is to enable delightful collaboration on code and data at any scale.
Yucheng was a co-founder and the Chief Architect at Turi, a ML startup acquired by Apple in 2016. At Apple, he worked on different parts of the ML platform stack ranging from storage to inference. His native language is C++, but Rust is rapidly becoming his new favorite. In his spare time, he bikes long distances and trains for triathlons. As of 2022 he still does not have a driving license.
Ajit is a co-founder at XetHub. His two decades of engineering experience included stints at Inktomi, Amazon (where he was part of the founding EC2 team in 2006), Facebook, and Apple. He has an entrepreneurial habit, having founded two other startups prior to XetData, one of which was acquired by BlueKai/Oracle. When not hacking, Ajit can be found savoring fine cocktails in Seattle bars and enjoying the beauty of the Pacific Northwest (hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter).
Rajat is a co-founder at XetHub. Rajat has spent most of his 20 years in industry building large scale distributed systems at Microsoft, AWS, and Apple. He joined Yucheng at Turi as the first employee, and has been building systems for ML ever since. At Apple, Rajat started and led the data platform team, presenting the group’s work at SIGMOD `19. At XetData, he wants to code more, but instead spends most of his time talking with customers and building cool demos. Outside of work, you'll find him spending time with his two small children, watching sports (NBA, NFL) or bad movies, or planning his next novice woodworking project.
Yonatan is a developer advocate at XetHub. An early adopter of Turi and pioneer in serverless machine learning, he was a founder's engineer in BuiltOn, Cybear, and Vaex. He spent his last 9 years helping startups implement machine learning and design smart solutions. At XetHub, he builds cool stuff and gives technical talks. In his free time, you can find him playing volleyball, basketball, and guitar, doing improv and teaching salsa.
Joe is a sofware engineer who has spent the past 8 years building distributed systems. He started his career at Yahoo, working on teams like Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Finance. He then joined Apple to work on the data management components for their machine learning platform. In his free time, he enjoys playing video games, learning to cook new recipes, and finding uses for his 3D printer.
Ann is a product person with experience across computer science, robotics, business, and user-centered design. After a decade at Boeing working on everything from autopilot simulation to flight deck concepts, she joined Turi as a senior product designer prior to leading product for Apple's internal ML compute platform. Ann enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, cooking and consuming delicious food, and enjoying the outdoors with her family.
Hoyt studied physics, statistics, and machine learning before joining Turi in 2013 as an early employee to work on scalable machine learning solutions aimed at non-ML developers. After Turi was acquired by Apple, he worked on core ML libraries at Apple, including CoreML and CreateML. His main interests include optimization, algorithms, ML, and scalable data processing. At XetHub, Hoyt is often writing low-level Rust code in our git extension and looking for ways to squeeze out more performance. Outside of technical work, Hoyt enjoys backpacking, hiking, mixology, coffee, and artistic metalworking.
Zach is a software engineer with broad experience across UI/UX, web, compilers, and data analysis and visualization. Prior to XetHub, he worked at Apple on system frameworks and at Turi on visualization. He likes mechanical keyboards, fountain pens, and playing chess.
Saba is a software engineer with experience in framework development, data visualization, and full stack web dev. Prior to joining XetHub he worked at Apple for three years designing and developing the Swift Charts framework. As an undergraduate researcher in the University of Washington's Interactive Data Lab (IDL) he contributed to Vega-Lite, a concise, declarative JSON grammar for building interactive data visualizations. In his spare time he enjoys eating delicious food, learning to cook, drinking coffee, reading non-fiction, going on walks, and playing video games with friends.
Prasid is a five-time head of marketing and two-time head of sales. Prasid started his career at Microsoft in Seattle, has lead marketing teams at SoFi and Twilio in Silicon Valley, and moved to New York to lead marketing for Codecademy. When not doing marketing, Prasid writes about marketing and plans adventures with his family and dog.
Brian is a software engineer who has been working in technology for over two decades. He's a technical polymath, having worked on all layers of the stack and in all sorts of roles from silicon design to support to visual design. Over the years, he's designed and built award winning software applications for companies big and small. He would have a Webby if dark museum money hadn't organized a last-minute, nefarious smear campaign against his app, but he's not bitter at all. In his spare time, he enjoys doing improv, swimming in the ocean, and making up convoluted stories about why he hasn't won a Webby yet.
Assaf is a software engineer with immense enthusiasm for building efficient and scalable programs with bleeding edge tech. He has with a background in robotics, low level systems and building web services, with particular experience building tools for software developers. When he’s not working, Assaf enjoys playing puzzle games (killer sudoku topping the charts), cooking, brewing specialty coffee, and the occasional video game.
Allison is a product designer with a background in data visualization, machine learning, and developer tools. She gained experience in building for scale while at Microsoft, how to support rich collaboration at GitLab, and how to make data more approachable at Tableau and Databricks. Allison enjoys working at all levels of design, from perfecting pixels to unifying a whole system of experiences. When she's not creating digital artifacts, she can be found learning a new hobby, whether it's sewing, 3D printing, origami, or any other craft she recently discovered from a YouTube video.
Di Xiao is a software engineer with a research background. Before joining XetHub, he had experience building Hadoop at Meta and did research in massive graph computations, cache systems, and high-performance memory abstractions. When he's not busy optimizing code, he's conquering tough rock climbing routes or learning new human languages like Spanish, French, and German.
Junpeng is a software engineer with a passion for machine learning infrastructure. He started his industry journey at Microsoft Research Asia, traveled through Meta and Google, and now has landed at XetHub. Back in 2013, Junpeng benchmarked GraphLab (later known as Turi) performance vs. Hadoop as an undergraduate. He had totally no idea that he would work with the founders of GraphLab ten years later. Outside of work, he views himself as a great chef. His dishes usually go empty first during potlucks.
Kelton enjoys developing tech applications to create end user value and benefit the society at large. He recently graduated from CMU and has previously interned at NetEase, DJI, HP, Jina AI, Wyze, and two VC firms. Kelton has built software under different contexts from building automation as the only developer in a financial firm, leading a startup team to build a college counseling chatbot, and contributing to a trending open source community project. Outside of work, Kelton likes playing basketball and Go.
