A toy maker waited days for a database refresh. A bank waited weeks. Delphix built its business around shrinking that interval - while keeping private data out of the wrong hands.

He began as a software developer, learned to sell an idea without sanding off its technical edges, and has spent more than a decade making a contrarian case for leaving enterprise data where it lives.
The enterprise AI race has produced a very old problem: the useful data is scattered everywhere. CData spent a decade standardizing those connections, and its unglamorous specialty has become the layer everyone suddenly needs.
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.
Black Tiger is a data platform company that helps enterprises turn messy, siloed data into trustworthy business results without lengthy migrations. Its virtual index technology connects directly to existing databases and applications, then applies AI-assisted rules to clean, deduplicate, verify and govern data in real time. Serving customers such as Honda, OVHcloud and Audika across France, Belgium and beyond, Black Tiger pitches fixed-price licensing and 2-to-3-month rollouts as an alternative to slow, usage-priced legacy data platforms.
K2view is an enterprise data company founded in 2009 and headquartered in Yokneam, Israel, with US operations in Texas. Its patented Data Product Platform is built on a proprietary micro-database technology that organizes fragmented enterprise data by business entity - a customer, order, product or loan - so each entity's data lives in its own encrypted, real-time, individually managed database. The approach powers data integration, test data management, data masking, synthetic data generation and, increasingly, AI-ready data pipelines that ground large language models and AI agents. K2view serves large enterprises in telecom, banking, healthcare, insurance and retail, including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and BBVA, and has raised roughly $43 million in funding.

Zetaris is an Australian enterprise data company building an open, agentic data lakehouse that lets organizations query and prepare data across many disparate sources without moving or copying it. Founded in 2013 in Melbourne by Vinay Samuel and Jason Jaesung Jun, the platform uses federated, in-place querying with intelligent multi-engine routing (Spark, Trino, Presto, DuckDB) and a unified semantic layer to feed private, governed AI workloads. It positions itself as a control plane for enterprise AI rather than another business-intelligence tool.
Denodo is a Palo Alto-headquartered enterprise software company whose flagship Denodo Platform pioneered data virtualization - a way to query data wherever it lives without copying it first. Founded in 1999 by Dr. Angel Vina out of research at Spain's University of A Coruna, the company now serves hundreds of large enterprises and has been named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools for six consecutive years.
Dr. Angel Vina is the Founder and CEO of Denodo Technologies, the global leader in data virtualization and data management platforms. A former academic who spent 25 years as a university professor at institutions including the Technical University of Madrid and the University of A Coruña - with postdoctoral research stints at UCLA and Stanford - Vina founded Denodo in Spain in 1999 after asking a deceptively simple question: how can we set data free? Today Denodo operates in 25 offices across 20 countries, has secured $336 million in Series B funding from TPG, and has been named a Gartner Leader in Data Integration Tools for five consecutive years. Vina's academic obsession with real-time distributed data systems became a commercial category - and a company that turned 25 in 2025.