We recently spoke with the chief executives of companies that participated in the recent AWS Startup Showcase: The Next Big Things in AI, Security & Life Sciences to find out what drives them and learn about their visions for the future. This feature is part of theCUBE’s ongoing CEO Startup Spotlight series.

Few people get the opportunity to start out in a family-owned real estate business and move all the way up to co-founding a venture-backed technology startup. Steven Mih (pictured), Ahana Cloud Inc.’s co-founder and chief executive officer, is one of those success stories.

As a driven young man, Mih cut his teeth across a wide array of industries, cultivating a set of invaluable business (and product) skills along the way. The earliest niche in which Ahana’s CEO gained valuable corporate experience was in the housing sector. At an early age, his mother acquired her broker’s license in real estate and ventured into the student housing market.

“That was a small business that I first was involved with, and I learned to wear a lot of small hats,” Mih said. “I helped clean up the apartments and mow the lawns. But most imprinting was that I would answer the phones from students who read the newspaper classified ads and tell students what was available — this is when I was just a kid, maybe nine or 10 years old.”

Today, Mih leads startup Ahana, which helps organizations simplify open data lake analytics with its managed service for Presto. In a bid to keep their processes efficient, scalable and agile, businesses are increasingly moving to and embracing cloud-based data lakes such as Amazon S3. S3 has become the infinite storage service for open data formats. The challenge becomes how to get insights from the data lake, and that’s where Ahana helps. With its managed service for Presto, an open-source SQL query engine, companies can run SQL queries on that S3 data lake for ad hoc querying, reporting and dashboarding, and much more. 

“What’s most important to data infra teams is to provide a system that enables analysts and data scientists to add value, sharing insights and delivering outcomes to their organization and/or end-customers,” said Mih. “Thus, data turns into analyses, viewpoints, decisions and business value.”

A story of consistent learning

Data — and the insights generated from it — continue to play an increasingly crucial role in an organization’s supply chain management, product development, marketing, pricing and financial management efforts. To that end, Ahana wants to cost-effectively simplify and secure the data insights generation process from the ground up.

Ahana may have just been founded 15 months ago, but its creation was years in the making.

While Mih’s early days gave him a small taste of sales and customer interaction, it was at Advanced Micro Devices Inc. in the ’90s — through its Technical Sales Engineer program — that Mih would really understand the inner workings of technology startups and thought leadership in the heart of Silicon Valley

As someone who loves technology and business, Mih always looked to work at companies that combined both passions. From AMD, he then moved on to electronic design automation software company Cadence Design Systems Inc. After working in technical sales at large, public companies for seven years, he decided that startups, rather than already-established names, would better suit his ambitions. With that, he made the move to join cross-platform virtualization company Transitive Inc., an early-stage startup at the time.

“I ran sales for them and did some business development as well. It was phenomenal tech,” Mih said. “We ended up selling the company to IBM back in 2008. I took some time off and then came back and got into the data side of things at Couchbase, which was also open source.”

Mih’s first taste of corporate leadership then came when he was presented with the opportunity to serve as the CEO of cloud native networking company Aviatrix Systems Inc. for three years. 

“I always wanted to start a company,” he said. “I tried to look at starting companies along the way. But then I had a ‘joiner’ opportunity to become CEO of Aviatrix, which is a cloud native networking company with 18 employees, and did that for three years. I saw a phenomenal opportunity with my co-founders around an open-source project called Presto, and we started Ahana 15 months ago. So that has been how the entrepreneurial journey finally happened.”

Mih’s time at Aviatrix spurred his entrepreneurial urge, and he started Ahana in 2020 with co-founders Dipti Borkar, David E. Simmen, Vivek Bharathan, Ashish Tadose and George Wang.

Driving expansion through value

Ahana now has a budding community built around the Presto open-source distributed SQL query engine.

Ahana Cloud is a managed service for Presto, a SQL query engine. It speeds up queries directly against large volumes of structured and unstructured data in AWS S3 data lakes. The ability to run queries on data lakes is seen, by many within and outside Ahana, as a more flexible and cheaper alternative to traditional data warehouse systems.

In August, the company announced it had raised a $20 million Series A funding. The round was led by Third Point Ventures and included GV (formerly Google Ventures), Leslie Ventures and Lux Capital. Third Point Ventures Managing Partner Robert Schwartz, also joined Ahana’s board of directors.

Ahana is going to pour its new funding into three areas: 1) expanding its technical teams and accelerating product development, 2) working hand-in-hand with the Presto community to spread the word about the Presto open source project, and 3) building out the go-to-market teams.

Ahana Cloud was a featured company during theCUBE’s recent AWS Startup Showcase: Innovations With CloudData and CloudOps event, participating in a joint discussion with its client, cybersecurity company Securonix Inc. Using Ahana’s technologies, Securonix is providing its clients with the tools needed to process large amounts of streaming data in real-time to protect customers against security threats. Ahana’s Presto underpinnings allow the product to provide Securonix with the speed and scale required to support such data queries — features that are critical to enterprise needs. 

“Being data-driven needs to be easier, cheaper and open. The modern data stack will be established on open-source tech and open data formats,” Mih said.

Mih referenced the “PHAS3 Stack,” as an example, an acronym delineating a set of open technologies he sees powering many modern data stacks: Presto, Apache Hudi, AWS Glue, and AWS S3. PHAS3 is pronounced “Faze,” with the 3 turning into an E.

“We think that open data lake analytics will become the sought-after standard, and Ahana will ultimately help all companies to be able to get the same benefits that some of the large hyperscalers who use Presto are getting,” Mih said.

After raising its $4.8 million seed round in June of last year, the company began offering managed services for Presto on a pay-as-you-go basis. From democratizing Presto technologies and opening the door for open data lake analytics, Ahana will continue to innovate on providing the easiest managed service for Presto on AWS. 

2021 and beyond

Ahana was founded in the pandemic’s early stages (April 2020). The company operates with an all-remote model that incorporates employees into shared virtual spaces — and aims to continue that way.

Modeled after GitLab Inc., the largest all-remote company in the world, its underpinnings have served to inspire much of how things are done at Ahana. The company is continuously striving to support its employees in every way possible and maintain its positive growth trajectory in the years to come.

“We have embraced intentional all-remote practices which enable us to achieve great outcomes while having personal flexibility,” Mih said.

As enterprises continue to rely on data to increasing magnitudes, sifting through that data and generating insights from them will require more sophisticated approaches. The open data lake analytics stack, with Presto at its heart, will make insight generation more expedient, efficient and cost-effective for organizations, according to Mih.

Photo: Steven Mih