Will Manning
I’m a co-founder of Spiral. We’re building data infrastructure for machine-scale consumption. I believe the next generation of workloads will require tremendous throughput: a single accelerator wanting to consume results at terabytes per second; RL and agent systems demanding enormous aggregate throughput divided by very high QPS.
Spiral is built around Vortex, a library for processor-portable compression that we donated to the Linux Foundation in August 2025. Most people know Vortex through its file format of the same name.
Back in the AI dark ages of 2009-2011, I did research on Bayesian Nonparametrics and Reinforcement Learning at Princeton. After that, I had a brief turn in industry as a derivatives quant.
I spent ten years at Palantir (2013-2022). I co-created and scaled Foundry. Most of my work was on things that read or wrote bytes: data, databases, compute, formats, scheduling. Spiral is my second exabyte-scale data system.