IAM Podcast for Startups · Stories of innovators, startup founders and entrepreneurs around the world

Data made easy by Aggua’s Data Management Platform with Avi Greenwald, CTO at Aggua

·29 min·1 clip

Agwa was built by asking managers in data what their pain was, not by pitching a prebuilt idea.

1. IAM Podcast for Startups speaks with Avi Greenwald about Agua’s data management platform and the problem it is built to solve. 2. Avi Greenwald is Agua’s CTO and co-founder, and Mariah hosts the conversation as the show’s presenter. 3. The episode asks how Agua moved from a vague startup idea to a product built from real pain points in data teams. 4. Avi says he is 31, recently married, has a dog, and is working for an apartment in Tel Aviv. 5. He describes a technical path that began with building computers with his brother, then a computer science degree at Makhon Lev in Jerusalem. 6. Avi says he served in the Shmuel HaMataim unit, took a course called MAMAS, and later worked around six years in management, programming, data engineering, and cybersecurity. 7. He then worked at Bring, a logistics and delivery platform, for two and a half years before COVID changed the company’s direction. 8. Avi says the original startup idea involved health and hospitals, but the team kept changing direction because the first idea did not work. 9. He says the team reviewed progress every two to three months for about a year and moved on when goals were not being met. 10. Avi says the final pivot came when the team left the health industry and started asking managers in data what pain they wanted solved. 11. He describes the core problem as a “knowledge management gap” that appears across organizations and becomes stronger in data because data itself is knowledge. 12. Avi says data teams need to understand where knowledge lives, who owns it, and what the next approach should be when people join or systems change. 13. He explains that Agua’s catalog works like a very smart wiki that helps data engineers, analysts, scientists, and business users understand their data. 14. He says the platform can document descriptions of reports, columns, and usage metrics, and then populate that information across the places that need it. 15. One customer story comes from a company Avi names as Avo, where many new hires needed faster onboarding and Agua helped document important data assets. 16. Avi says that work reduced onboarding from one or two months to about one week. 17. Another example comes from Artlist, where Agua’s data lineage tool helped teams understand how tables, pipelines, and downstream dashboards connect. 18. Avi says the lineage view can reduce days of reverse engineering into about 20 to 30 minutes when engineers need to see how a change affects another dashboard. 19. The interview style is conversational and founder-focused, with Mariah asking practical follow-ups about pivots, customers, team size, and product details. 20. People building data infrastructure or early-stage startups may find this useful, while listeners wanting narrative storytelling or consumer-tech news may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded founder story about building from real data-team pain.

Greenwald is most convincing when he starts with the pain instead of the pitch. He explains that the team first talked with managers in data, then built Agua around what they actually needed: a way to capture important data assets, keep that knowledge usable, and cut down on…

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You hear how a data startup starts from customer pain, not a polished idea.

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