HEAVY.AI

The inspiration for the company came from co-founder Todd Mostak's experience as a graduate student at Harvard, where he was researching the role of social media in the Arab Spring. Frustrated by the long processing times of traditional CPU-based platforms for analyzing hundreds of millions of tweets, he conceived the idea of a GPU-accelerated analytics platform. This led him to become a research fellow at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where the foundational technology for HEAVY.AI was developed.

HEAVY.AI's core technology leverages the massive parallelism of modern GPU and CPU hardware to query and visualize multi-billion-row datasets with millisecond response times. The product suite includes HeavyDB, an open-source SQL engine; Heavy Immerse, a browser-based visual analytics client; Heavy Render for server-side rendering of large visualizations; and HeavyConnect, which allows querying data in place without moving it. In March 2024, the company introduced HeavyIQ, an LLM-powered conversational analytics feature allowing users to query data using natural language.

The company operates on a subscription and enterprise licensing model, offering its platform both on-premise and as a managed cloud service. It serves a diverse client base across industries such as government, telecommunications, energy, automotive, and investment management. HEAVY.AI has established key partnerships with hardware manufacturers like NVIDIA and cloud service providers including AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. As of March 2022, Jon Kondo serves as CEO, with Todd Mostak transitioning to the role of CTO.

The company has raised a total of $91.6 million over five funding rounds, with major investors including Tiger Global Management, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), In-Q-Tel, NVIDIA, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Verizon Ventures.