ai-data-platform
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SuperAnnotate and the Art of Deciding What Counts
A tool born to trace the edge of a pixel now helps companies decide whether an AI answer is any good. The hard part was never drawing the line; it was agreeing where the line belonged.
Cloudian Survived a Telco Crash. Now It Wants to Feed AI Without Shipping Your Data Away
Cloudian turned the wreckage of a mobile-messaging company into an enterprise storage business. Its newest wager is that the AI race will be won as much in the data room as in the GPU rack.
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.
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.