Maceo Cardinale Kwik is Co-Founder and CEO of Datost (YC P26), an AI data analyst platform that integrates directly into Slack to democratize data access across entire organizations.

Maceo earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, graduating Summa Cum Laude with a 4.0 GPA, and went on to work as a Full Stack Software Engineer at Traba, a high-growth staffing marketplace.

Maceo identified the core problem firsthand at Traba, where data-rich teams lacked enough analysts to answer business questions in time, and co-founded Lighthouse Startups, a non-profit, reflecting his early drive for community and entrepreneurial leadership.

Before launching Datost, Maceo built scalable marketplace infrastructure and AI/ML-powered systems at Traba, and previously held engineering roles at SimonComputing and Performant Software, gaining deep full-stack expertise.

Datost, a Y Combinator P26 company, scored 75.2% on BIRD-Interact, the hardest public text-to-SQL benchmark, more than doubling the 33% score of the best standalone frontier model and proving the transformative power of its semantic layer approach.