Hamzah Chaudhary

Hamzah Chaudhary is a British-Pakistani entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Lightdash, the open-source business intelligence platform built for modern data teams. He studied at the University of Cambridge before beginning his career in the technology sector, ultimately developing deep expertise in data infrastructure and product management during his time at UK insurtech Cytora, where he joined as the second engineering hire and eventually became Director of Product Management, helping grow the company from seed through Series B.

In 2020, Hamzah co-founded Lightdash alongside CTO Oliver Laslett, initially as a data quality tool for their consultancy before pivoting to build what would become one of the leading open-source alternatives to Looker. The company graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2020 cohort, and after a viral launch on Hacker News in 2021 — where Lightdash was dubbed 'open-source Looker' — it quickly gained traction within the global dbt community. Lightdash is purpose-built to sit natively atop dbt, allowing data teams to centralise business logic and enable self-serve analytics across the entire organisation.

Under Hamzah's leadership, Lightdash has raised an $8.4 million seed round in 2022 and an $11 million Series A in 2024, both led by Accel. Usage has grown over 50x in two years, with major customers including Workday, Tesla, Beauty Pie and Morning Brew. The company has launched an AI Analyst product that allows business users to query data in natural language, governed by the same security and permissions framework that enterprise customers already trust.