Shirshanka Das

Co-Founder and CTO DataHub

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Shirshanka Das is co-founder and chief technology officer of DataHub, the company that until May 2025 was called Acryl Data. The product is a metadata platform: a system that keeps track of what data an organisation has, where each dataset came from, what it means, who owns it and whether it can be trusted. Das built the original version of it at LinkedIn, where he was overall architect for Big Data from 2010 to 2020 and set the company’s metadata and data-management strategy, then released it as open source. DataHub the open-source project is now used by more than 3,000 organisations with a community of over 13,000 members; DataHub the company sells a managed enterprise version of it to Apple, Netflix, Slack, Pinterest, Optum, Chime and Foursquare among others. The pitch has sharpened as AI has arrived: as Das put it when the company raised its Series B, “DataHub provides the context that AI systems need to understand data lineage, quality, and semantics.”

Career Highlights

• Founded the open-source DataHub project at LinkedIn and grew it into the metadata platform behind productivity and governance work there.
• Overall architect for Big Data at LinkedIn, 2010 to 2020, responsible for metadata and data-management strategy across the company.
• Co-founded Acryl Data with Swaroop Jagadish to build a commercial product around DataHub, serving as chief technology officer.
• Led the technical side through the company’s May 2025 rebrand from Acryl Data to DataHub and a $35 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, taking total funding to $65 million.
• PMC member and committer on Apache Gobblin, a data-ingestion framework managing over 100 petabytes of data assets and deployed at Verizon and PayPal among others.
• Built foundational systems across operational, streaming and data-warehousing stacks over more than a decade, including high-performance serving systems at Yahoo and PayPal before LinkedIn.
• Frequent conference speaker on data infrastructure and data quality, including at the Airflow Summit, the Open Source Analytics Conference and Data Council.

Professional Journey

Das began in high-performance serving systems — the infrastructure that answers a query in milliseconds at large scale — working on those problems at Yahoo and then at PayPal. In 2010 he joined LinkedIn, where he spent a decade as overall architect for Big Data. That role put him across the whole of LinkedIn’s data estate: operational stores, streaming pipelines and the data warehouse, and the question of how anyone was supposed to find their way around it.

The answer he built was DataHub. At a company with LinkedIn’s data volume, the binding constraint is not storage or compute but knowledge: which of several similarly named tables is authoritative, what a column actually means, what breaks downstream if a schema changes, and who to ask. DataHub was designed as the metadata layer that answers those questions, and Das founded it as an open-source project rather than an internal tool — a decision that gave it a life beyond LinkedIn. He also worked on Apache Gobblin, LinkedIn’s data-ingestion framework, where he remains a PMC member and committer; Gobblin now manages more than 100 petabytes of data assets at organisations including Verizon and PayPal.

In 2020 he left LinkedIn to co-found Acryl Data with Swaroop Jagadish, who took the chief executive role while Das became chief technology officer. The company’s purpose was to build a managed, enterprise-grade product on the open-source project Das had created, without pulling the project itself behind a paywall — the open-source version continued to grow, reaching more than 3,000 organisations and a community above 13,000 members.

On 21 May 2025 the company announced a $35 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with 8VC, Tru Arrow, SineWave, In-Q-Tel and Zero Prime participating, bringing total funding to $65 million; Bessemer’s Lauri Moore joined the board. At the same time it dropped the Acryl Data name and became simply DataHub, aligning the company with the project. The framing of the raise reflected where the market had moved: metadata was no longer only a governance and productivity concern but the context layer that AI systems need in order to use enterprise data safely. The company reported six-fold growth in its DataHub Cloud enterprise service over the preceding two years.

Education

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Ph.D., Computer Science

No undergraduate institution is named in any source that could be verified; nothing further is recorded.