Ben Pfaff is Co-Founder and Chief Engineer at Feldera, a real-time incremental data processing and analytics platform built for continuous SQL computation over live and historical data sources.

Ben earned his computer science PhD from Stanford University in 2007 and joined Nicira Networks as one of its first employees, where he founded the Open vSwitch and OVN projects that became foundational to modern software-defined networking.

Ben is a Senior Member of ACM and a Fellow of the Open Networking Foundation, with over 25 years of open source software experience spanning contributions to Debian, GNU, and the OpenFlow specification.

After VMware acquired Nicira, Ben continued leading Open vSwitch and OVN development before joining VMware Research, then co-founded Feldera alongside a team of VMware Research alumni to commercialize incremental computation technology.

Feldera has raised $21.5M in total funding including a $15.4M Series A led by Innovia Venture Fund with participation from Battery Ventures and Costanoa Ventures, and its platform processes millions of events per second for real-time analytics use cases.