data-lakes
(3)
The Company That Tried to Put One Lock on Every Data Door
Okera sold a deceptively simple idea: write the rule for sensitive data once, then make it follow the data everywhere. Databricks bought the company in 2023, just as AI made the old permission problem larger and stranger.
AI One
AI One is a New York-based enterprise software company that builds an Enterprise Context Management (ECM) platform - a lightweight layer that sits beneath enterprise AI and agentic applications. Rather than forcing companies to migrate data into a new lake or warehouse first, AI One connects directly to the systems large organizations already run (Salesforce, Workday, on-premise databases, APIs and documents), resolves entities across fragmented data, and enforces security and permissions so AI operates with real business context instead of guessing. Founded in 2024 by Conor Twomey and Fergus Keenan, the company targets Fortune 500 firms in financial services, healthcare, insurance, energy and private equity, and raised $11M total including a $7M Series A led by Vestigo Ventures.
Anand Periasamy
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.