“At this point there were just three of us in the company, and our ambition was to reach 10 people,” Terry McCann said in August 2026, looking back on when his firm first joined the Databricks partner program. It now has about 125 people (founders’ interview). He is the chief executive and a co-founder of Advancing Analytics, a data and AI consultancy in London, England.
Consulting at Adatis
Before starting the firm he spent two years at Adatis Consulting, where he built big data systems and data science platforms on Microsoft Azure, led strategy sessions with customers, and set the company’s direction in data science (launch post).
Founding Advancing Analytics
He announced Advancing Analytics in December 2018 as a consultancy for the Azure data platform, data science, and data engineering. His stated aim was to make data scientists’ work easier through DataOps, which he tied to deploying machine learning models. Alongside the firm he launched a podcast, Data Science in Production, with an early episode featuring Matei Zaharia, the creator of Apache Spark (launch post).
In May 2019 he brought in Simon Whiteley, whom he had worked with for three years, as director of engineering and a part owner of the business (company announcement).
Raising Outside Investment in 2026
The firm took a growth investment from Lead Edge Capital in June 2026. “We’ve built Advancing Analytics by solving hard problems and investing in genuinely great people,” he said at the time (investment announcement). Databricks Ventures invested in August 2026, and he said the firm aims to triple in size by 2030 as it grows in Europe and on the US East Coast (founders’ interview).