Peter Wang

Before founding Anaconda he spent about 15 years in software design and development, working on 3D graphics, geophysics, large-scale data simulation and visualization, financial risk modeling and medical imaging.⁠[1]

He was director of technical architecture at Enthought, where he wrote the interactive plotting toolkit Chaco and was a core developer of the Enthought Tool Suite.⁠[2]

He has said he started coding young without a computer science degree; he and his co-founder started Anaconda, then Continuum Analytics, in 2012, a business he traces to their time as software consultants who saw grassroots adoption of Python for business data analysis.⁠[3]

He wrote that when he and Travis Oliphant started the company in 2012, their vision was to transform data analysis and business computing with Python and its open-source ecosystem.⁠[4]

At Continuum Analytics he served as chief technology officer, guiding the Anaconda platform and open-source projects such as Bokeh and Blaze, and created the PyData conference.⁠[5]

He has also been described as the creator of widely used packages including Bokeh and Datashader.⁠[6]

In April 2016 he took part in a conversation at Cornell Tech as founder and CTO of Continuum Analytics; he holds a B.A. in physics from Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, and the company was based in Austin, Texas.⁠[7]

On October 9, 2019, he announced that he was becoming CEO of Anaconda; he had previously served as president, and it was his first time as chief executive. He credited predecessor Scott Collison with turning the company from an open-source consultancy into a product company.⁠[8]

In April 2020 Anaconda changed the terms of service for repo.anaconda.com, asking heavy commercial users of its public repository to buy commercial products; he said the company alone bore the costs of packaging, testing and petabytes of monthly bandwidth, and that students, academics and hobbyists were unaffected.⁠[9]

In October 2020 he announced the Anaconda Dividend Program with NumFOCUS to direct part of the company’s revenue to open-source projects, starting with a $10,000 seed donation and committing at least 1% of 2021 revenue, with a minimum of $25,000.⁠[10]

In May 2021 he wrote that he is a first-generation Chinese American who arrived in the United States at seven, and argued that tech has an “Asian glass ceiling” limiting Asian Americans’ advancement to top ranks.⁠[11]

He appeared on episode 250 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing Python and programming language design, virtuality, the “source code” of humans, AI, the meaning crisis and Travis Oliphant, among other topics.⁠[12]

In March 2022 he wrote on Anaconda’s behalf that the company was offering relocation and economic help to its staff in Ukraine, had donated to the Red Cross and other charities and was complying with US sanctions on Russia, but was not then joining a broader IT services boycott.⁠[13]

In 2022 he gave a keynote at PyCon US in Salt Lake City introducing PyScript, a framework for running Python applications in the browser, which he called “truly serverless computing.”⁠[14]

In August 2023 MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry launched a public preview of Python in Excel built with Anaconda; in a statement he called it “a major breakthrough.”⁠[15]

In January 2024 board member Barry Libert became CEO of Anaconda, and he was named chief AI and innovation officer, leading the new internal R&D group AI Incubator while remaining on the board.⁠[16]

That July he said the aim was to make Python itself more scalable and more efficient, especially on new hardware.⁠[17]

On April 16, 2025, at a Berkman Klein Center event at Harvard Law School, he and Chandler Vaughn discussed intellectual property in the age of AI and proposed building an open AI commons.⁠[18]

In May 2025 he published an open letter expressing regret that the previous year’s enforcement of the terms of service had surprised academic and research users, and announced rewritten terms under which individuals, eligible academic and nonprofit institutions and for-profit organizations with 200 or fewer workers could use Anaconda free.⁠[19]

In July 2025 he announced that Anaconda had raised more than $150 million in Series C funding led by Insight Partners.⁠[4]

The round valued Anaconda at $1.5 billion, with MubadalaMubadala Investment CompanyMubadala Investment Company (Mubadala) is a sovereign investor wholly owned by the Government of Abu Dhabi. It was formed in 2017 by the merger of the International Petroleum Investment Company (IPIC), founded in 1984, and Mubadala Development Company, founded in 2002, and absorbed the Abu Dhabi Investment Council the following year; as of the end of 2025 it managed about AED 1.4 trillion (US$385 billion) in assets, with business in more than 80 countries.Open the full entry participating.⁠[20]

In April 2026 he and David DeSanto wrote about OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s acquisition of Astral, the team behind uv and Ruff, recalling precedents such as XenSource and Sun, and previewed Anaconda Desktop.⁠[21]

As of October 2026 he is co-founder and chief AI and innovation officer of Anaconda, leading the AI Incubator, which focuses on core Python technologies and open-source AI and machine learning.⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/pwang (opens in a new window)⁠[12]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pzwang/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Anaconda: Official website: https://www.anaconda.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[12]