ai-data-platform
(4)
Vinay Samuel
Vinay Samuel is the founder and CEO of Zetaris, a data virtualization and analytical data fabric company he started in a Melbourne garage in 2013 after walking away from a million-dollar executive contract. A first-generation Australian and self-taught programmer since age 14, he spent two decades in senior roles at Teradata, Greenplum, Vertica and Hewlett-Packard before building technology that lets enterprises query data wherever it lives, without first moving it into a data lake. Zetaris has raised roughly $30 million from investors including In-Q-Tel, works with customers such as Telstra, NBN, Optus, Nokia and Melbourne Water, and now positions its platform to prepare data for AI faster and at lower cost.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
Will Manning
Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.
Vendia
Vendia is an AI data platform that enables real-time, governed data sharing across companies, clouds, and regions. Founded by Tim Wagner (creator of AWS Lambda) and Shruthi Rao (former AWS blockchain head), Vendia helps enterprises like BMW, Delta Air Lines, and Fannie Mae break down data silos through its flagship product Vendia Share and newer MCP Gateway - allowing multiple parties to collaborate on trusted data without sacrificing security, compliance, or control.