The San Francisco Bay Area remains one of the deepest markets for data and infrastructure companies, and women founders continue to play central roles in shaping how data is moved, monitored, evaluated, and used in production. The leaders in this group are building across fraud and risk infrastructure, AI observability, data governance, and decision intelligence. Together, they reflect how closely data infrastructure now overlaps with AI, enterprise software, and operational systems.
Neha Narkhede
Co-founder & CEO — Oscilar
Neha Narkhede is the co-founder and CEO of Oscilar. Before starting the company, she co-founded Confluent and was one of the original creators of Apache Kafka, giving her one of the strongest technical founder profiles in this group. Public profile sources also place her in Palo Alto, tying her directly to the Bay Area ecosystem.
Oscilar builds an AI-powered risk decisioning platform focused on fraud, credit, and compliance. The company describes itself as helping businesses manage online transaction risk in real time, placing it in a part of the infrastructure market where data systems and financial trust overlap directly.
Aparna Dhinakaran
Co-founder & CPO — Arize AI
Aparna Dhinakaran is the co-founder and chief product officer of Arize AI. Before founding the company, she worked as an ML engineer and leader at Uber, Apple, and TubeMogul, and at Uber she helped build core machine learning infrastructure including Michelangelo. Public sources also place her in Berkeley.
Arize AI is a Bay Area company focused on AI observability, evaluation, and monitoring. Its platform is built around helping teams understand model performance and troubleshoot AI systems in production, which makes it one of the more visible companies in the emerging AI infrastructure and observability layer.
Prukalpa Sankar
Co-founder & Co-CEO — Atlan
Prukalpa Sankar is the co-founder and co-CEO of Atlan. Public profile sources place her in San Francisco, and recent reporting has highlighted her as one of the founders leading the company through a rapid growth period tied to AI and data governance. Before Atlan, she co-founded SocialCops.
Atlan builds a data and AI governance platform designed to help organizations manage context, access, and collaboration across modern data stacks. In 2024, the company raised a $105 million Series C that valued it at $750 million, and it said customers included Autodesk, Nasdaq, Ralph Lauren, and News Corp.
Claudia Natasia
CEO & Co-Founder — Riley AI
Claudia Natasia is the CEO and co-founder of Riley AI. Public profile sources describe her as having led product, research, and data science teams across enterprise and financial technology before founding Riley, and identify her as one of the company’s co-founders.
Riley AI is a Bay Area company building a customer intelligence platform designed to help brands make faster product and merchandising decisions from data. The company has positioned itself around making decision intelligence more accessible, giving it a place in the part of the infrastructure market where analytics, product strategy, and AI converge.
Where Bay Area Women in Data & Infrastructure Are Building
These four founders represent different parts of the Bay Area data and infrastructure market. Oscilar is focused on risk and fraud decisioning, Arize AI on AI observability, Atlan on data governance, and Riley AI on customer intelligence and decision infrastructure.
That range reflects how broad the category has become. Data infrastructure in the Bay Area is no longer limited to storage and pipelines. It now includes the systems that evaluate models, govern access, detect risk, and turn operational data into usable business decisions.
The Bay Area’s innovation story also runs through the investors backing the next generation of startups. Read the San Francisco Bay Area Women Venture Capitalists to Watch in 2026 for another look at the women shaping how capital flows across the region’s technology ecosystem.
