Kishore Gopalakrishna

Kishore Gopalakrishna is the Co-founder and CEO of StarTree, the Mountain View–based company that offers real-time analytics as a service, built around Apache Pinot — the high-performance distributed OLAP datastore Kishore originally created at LinkedIn and which now powers real-time, user-facing analytics at companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Stripe, Walmart, and Target. Founded in January 2020, StarTree commercialises Pinot for enterprises that need sub-second analytics on freshly ingested data at scale — the layer underneath consumer-facing AI features, personalised feeds, ad serving, fraud detection, and increasingly, observability for agentic AI workflows where decisions need to be made in milliseconds on live event streams. Apache Pinot graduated to version 1.0 in 2023 after a decade of development, with a 170x increase in adopting companies over five years. Beyond Pinot, Kishore is the original author of Apache Helix (distributed cluster management), Espresso (LinkedIn's NoSQL document store), and ThirdEye (anomaly detection). Before founding StarTree, he was a Senior Staff Engineer at LinkedIn for nearly nine years, and earlier a Senior Technical Yahoo at Yahoo! working on ad serving and real-time bidding systems. He holds a BS in Electrical and Electronics from National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK).

Kishore earns his place on the AIM Next 15 AI CEOs in America 2026 for building one of the foundational real-time data infrastructure companies of the AI era — and for occupying the layer the entire industry is increasingly converging on as agentic AI moves from offline reasoning to real-time decisioning over live data streams. As enterprise AI systems shift from periodic batch retraining to continuous learning and continuous action, the real-time analytics layer Pinot pioneered at LinkedIn becomes definitional infrastructure. Few founders in this category have both Kishore's depth of technical authorship (multiple Apache top-level projects he originally wrote) and the operator track record to commercialise that work at scale.