Technical Talks

Serhii Sokolenko

Co-Founder & CEO | Tower

Brad Heller

Co-Founder & CTO | Tower

AI Launchpad 2025: Tower

Run your favorite Python frameworks, from ETL to feature transforms and inference, on scalable single-node compute and Iceberg open storage. Serhii and Brad, Tower's co-founders, met at Snowflake, after working at Google, Puppet, AWS and Databricks. They are atoning for their Big Tech sins by building a simple, but elegant 2-layer data stack where all compute engines are nice to each other. Tower is startup #3 for both Brad and Serhii.

Co-Founder & CEO

Serhii Sokolenko

Tower

Serhii Sokolenko is the CEO and co-founder of Tower.dev, a platform for Data + AI apps that run on open Iceberg storage and play nicely with other engines. Before founding Tower, Serhii worked at Databricks in the Unity Catalog compute group, at Snowflake on a high-concurrency, low-latency version of the data warehouse, and at Google Cloud Dataflow, building a unified batch and streaming data platform. His first startup was about opinion and emotion identification in natural text, and his second startup introduced NLP to LegalTech.

Co-Founder & CTO

Brad Heller

Tower

Brad Heller is the CTO and co-founder of Tower.dev, a next generation data platform for Data + AI apps that use Iceberg storage. Tower.dev is a platform as a service that solves infrastructure problems for data engineering teams. Prior to founding Tower.dev, Brad worked on the control plane at Snowflake. Brad is located in Berlin, Germany, but was born and raised on the west coast of the US.