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Guy Fighel

Speaker

Guy Fighel

6

talks

Partner, Head of Data & AI Program Hetz Ventures

Guy Fighel is a technology executive with over 25 years of experience building scalable global software solutions, with deep expertise in development and machine learning. He served as SVP & GM of Data Platform Engineering & AI at New Relic after co-founding SignifAI and serving as CTO, with SignifAI providing an AI-powered correlation engine for DevOps and SRE teams. He has led cross-national teams, holds over 20 patents, and specializes in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and machine intelligence; he currently advises founders at Hetz Ventures on building tech stacks and assembling top-tier teams.

Bio from: Big Data LDN 2025

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Are AI code generators delivering SQL that "looks right but works wrong" for your data engineering challenges? Is your AI generating brilliant-sounding but functionally flawed results? 

The critical bottleneck isn't the AI's intelligence; it's the missing context.

In this talk, we will put thing in context and reveal how providing AI with structured, deep understanding—from data semantics and lineage to user intent and external knowledge—is the true paradigm shift. 

We'll explore how this context engineering powers the rise of dependable AI agents and leverages techniques like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to move beyond mere text generation towards trustworthy, intelligent automation across all domains. 

This limitation highlights a broader challenge across AI applications: the need for systems to possess a deep understanding of all relevant signals, ranging from environmental cues and user history to explicit intent, to achieve reliable and meaningful operation.

Join us for real-world, practical case studies directly from data engineers that demonstrate precisely how to unlock this transformative power and achieve truly reliable AI.

Face To Face
with Guy Fighel (Hetz Ventures) , Gal Peretz (Carbyne) , Lee Twito (Lemonade)

The data engineer’s role is shifting in the AI era. With LLMs and agents as new consumers, the challenge moves from SQL and schemas to semantics, context engineering, and making databases LLM-friendly. This session explores how data engineers can design semantic layers, document relationships, and expose data through MCPs and AI interfaces. We’ll highlight new skills required, illustrate pipelines that combine offline and online LLM processing, and show how data can serve business users, developers, and AI agents alike.

Face To Face
with Shachar Meir (Shachar Meir) , Guy Fighel (Hetz Ventures) , Rob Hulme , Sarah Levy (Euno) , Harry Gollop (Cognify Search) , Joe Reis (DeepLearning.AI)

Practicing analytics well takes more than just tools and tech. It requires data modeling practices that unify and empower all teams within analytics, from engineers to analysts. This is especially true as AI becomes a part of analytics. Without a governed data model that provides consistent data interpretation, AI tools are left to guess. Join panelists Joe Reis, Sarah Levy, Harry Gollop, Rob Hulme, Shachar Meir, and Guy Fighel, as they share battle-tested advice on overcoming conflicting definitions and accurately mapping business intent to data, reports and dashboards at scale. This panel is for data & analytics engineers seeking a clear framework to capture business logic across layers, and for data leaders focused on building a reliable foundation for Gen AI.

talk
with Dan Tobin (Databricks) , Steve Sobel (Databricks) , Andrew Ferguson (Databricks) , Sri Tikkireddy (Databricks) , Aaron Jacobson (NEA) , Guy Fighel (Hetz Ventures) , George Webster (Zigguratum Inc) , Nima Alidoust (Tahoe Therapeutics) , Sarah Catanzaro (Amplify Partners) , Atindriyo Sanyal (Galileo)

Hear from VC leaders, startup founders and early stage customers building on Databricks around what they are seeing in the market and how they are scaling their early stage companies on Databricks. This event is a must see for VCs, founders and those interested in the early stage company ecosystem.

Meet some of the most prominent UK data founders and delve into what it takes to start a high-growth business in the data space. With the panel collective expertise covering SaaS, M&A, professional services, advisory, product companies and everything in between, this is an event not to miss. This panel is a true celebration of the UK entrepreneurial talent - you will learn about the founders’ personal journeys, their experience of significantly scaling and growing their businesses and the role that their tenacity, perseverance and determination to build something new and different have played in it. 

The panel will also be joined by a special panel guest Richard Shaw, who will share the investors outlook and the insight about the eco-system out there available to support new generation of data founders on their journey.

Featured panelists:

• Chris Tabb, co-founder and CCO, LEIT Data

• Anna Sutton, co-founder and CEO, Data Refinery, exited co-founder of Data Shed (acquired by Hippo Digital in 2023)

• Chelsea Wilkinson, co-founder and CEO, Data Diligence

• Rowena Humby, co-founder and CEO, Starcount

• Richard Shaw, Partner, Growth Capital Partners

• Guy Fighel, Venture Partner and Head of Data Program - Hetz Ventures

The panel will be hosted by Svetlana Tarnagurskaja, co-founder and CEO of The Dot Collective.

In the next five years, we are poised to witness a significant transformation towards modern data lake architecture across industries. This shift is driven by an urgent need for a unified, flexible, and scalable data management solution. Such a solution must address the challenges of siloed data environments and the increasing complexity of data sources while balancing the benefits of data mesh principles with centralized governance and semantic consistency.

In this talk, we will cover latest trends and benefits in this field, as well as usage of open formats like Iceberg, lower costs of data movement, & multiple engines to support different workloads that ultimately helps in getting into a single source of truth.