Press | Crux

Crux Hires Venkat Konatalapalli to Accelerate Data Engineering & Operations for External Data Integration

Written by Patrick Ball | Jun 11, 2024

Venkat joins the company’s senior leadership team as its first SVP of Data Engineering.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 11, 2024 – Crux, which provides an end-to-end external data integration and operations platform to scale data delivery, announced today that Venkat Konatalapalli has joined the company as its first SVP of Data Engineering. In this role, Venkat will oversee the Data Engineering & Data Operations functions that power Crux Forge, Crux’s suite of services that bridges the gap between data suppliers and enterprise consumers to accelerate the time-to-value of external data. With powerful tools, expertise, and a growing ecosystem of data supplier partnerships, Crux makes the world’s external data model-ready by revolutionizing the way enterprises source, ingest, validate, and model external datasets.

“I am excited to leverage my experience building self-service data management platforms in the high stakes world of quantitative finance and alpha generation to help realize Crux’s vision to transform all data into a state ready for data science and analytics,” said Venkat. “We are committed to maintaining expert-level knowledge of all data products in the Crux ecosystem, and understand that our ability to provide consistent, high-quality data is crucial to our success and our customers.”

Mr. Konatalapalli brings a deep understanding of customer perspectives and multiple dimensions of data management expertise to Crux. With over 25 years of experience in investment data management, including high-profile data engineering leadership roles at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), Blackrock’s Aladdin®, and more recently as Head of Data Engineering at Allspring Global Investments, Venkat built and developed large-scale data platforms serving portfolio managers, quantitative investment researchers, and other stakeholders across a broad variety of asset classes and data sources. 

"I'm pleased to welcome Venkat to the Crux leadership team and am excited to work with him as we continue to invest in our Crux Forge Data Engineering and Operations capabilities," said Will Freiberg, CEO, Crux. "This is a critical role for Crux Forge, our core offering today that includes industry-leading Declarative Dataset Management technology paired with expert data engineering and operations services.”

About Crux 

Crux is a cloud-based data integration, transformation, and operations platform that delivers model-ready external data at scale for mission-critical applications. Crux partners with customers to ensure they get the data they need, how they need it, and where they need it. The Crux team builds data pipelines at scale and operates over 60,000 pipelines, delivering public and commercial external datasets to customer destinations of choice. Crux pipelines come with embedded data monitoring, validations, and transformations, which are supported 24/7 by the company’s global data operations team. Crux is backed by Two Sigma, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citi. Learn more about Crux at www.cruxdata.com.