Zetaris has launched Zetaris Cloud and its AI Data Harness, a cloud-based platform designed to give AI models and agents secure, real-time access to enterprise data without requiring organizations to first move or centralize that information.
The San Francisco-based company also announced that Steve Nouri, CEO and co-founder of GenAI Works, has joined as AI Strategy Advisor, while Zetaris has become a SpaceXAI Partner Network Transformation Partner.
The announcements come as Zetaris prepares to participate with SpaceXAI in the Open Agent Hackathon 2026, a 144-hour online event scheduled for October 22 through October 27. More than 5,000 developers from over 100 countries are expected to participate.
Zetaris developed its AI Data Harness to address what it sees as a widening gap between the rapid advancement of AI software development and the comparatively slow process of connecting enterprise AI systems with usable organizational data.
AI coding tools can increasingly generate functional software in a matter of minutes. But enterprise information often remains distributed across cloud platforms, on-premises infrastructure and edge systems, with inconsistent formats, governance requirements and access controls.
That fragmentation can create delays as organizations attempt to consolidate information into centralized platforms before AI systems can use it.
Zetaris takes a federated approach. Its AI Data Harness allows AI systems to query data where it already resides across structured, unstructured and streaming sources.
The company said organizations can access information without first duplicating it or completing a large-scale data centralization project.
Security policies, governance and access controls are applied across the environment so that AI agents can retrieve information while organizations retain control over who and what can access particular data.
Zetaris said its architecture can reduce total cost of ownership by up to 67%, based on internal measurements from pre- and post-enterprise customer assessments.
Zetaris Cloud makes that architecture available as a cloud service and is designed to work independently of a specific cloud provider, data platform or AI model.
The company positions the technology as an open, vendor-agnostic layer between an organization’s AI systems and its existing data infrastructure.
Rather than replacing underlying data engines, Zetaris can work with technologies including Spark, Presto and Trino to provide access to information distributed across an enterprise.
The approach is intended to give organizations greater flexibility as they deploy different AI models, agents and applications without creating a separate data pipeline or centralized copy of information for each new use case.
Zetaris also sees data duplication as a growing infrastructure challenge as enterprises expand their use of generative and agentic AI.
Traditional data architectures frequently involve copying information between systems, which can increase requirements for storage, networking and computing infrastructure.
The company believes reducing unnecessary data movement could lower both the financial and energy requirements associated with enterprise AI.
Over time, Zetaris expects more AI processing to take place near the location where information is generated, including across edge-device networks, instead of sending every workload through centralized data centers.
The company’s new technology will receive a large-scale developer test during the Open Agent Hackathon 2026.
Participants will use SpaceXAI’s Grok Build alongside the Zetaris AI Data Harness to develop applications capable of working with distributed enterprise data securely and in real time.
The fully online event is being hosted by GenAI Works and will include a $20,000 prize pool.
Zetaris expects the event to demonstrate how coding harnesses and data harnesses can operate as complementary layers when developers build AI-enabled enterprise workflows.
The company also announced Nouri’s appointment as AI Strategy Advisor as it expands its positioning within the enterprise AI market.
Nouri is CEO and co-founder of GenAI Works, which organizes the Open Agent Hackathon and operates a global artificial intelligence community.
He previously led data science teams at CSIRO’s Data61 and the Australian Computer Society and was named Australia’s ICT Professional of the Year through the Gold Disruptor award.
Nouri is also the founder of AI4Diversity, a nonprofit focused on supporting underrepresented talent in artificial intelligence, and holds a master’s degree in IT and data analytics from the University of Technology Sydney.
His appointment comes as Zetaris scales its AI Data Harness and seeks to increase adoption among organizations trying to connect AI systems with fragmented enterprise data estates.
KEY QUOTES:
“Coding harnesses have dramatically accelerated software development, but enterprise AI still struggles to access trustworthy, governed data. Our AI Data Harness gives AI tools a real-time path to the data they need, wherever it lives, without forcing companies to centralize everything first.”
Vinay Samuel, CEO and Co-Founder of Zetaris
“Putting these technologies in the hands of thousands of developers will show what becomes possible when AI agents can work with live enterprise data without sacrificing security. The hackathon is designed to move that idea from theory into working applications.”
Vinay Samuel, CEO and Co-Founder of Zetaris
“A coding harness is an important part of building enterprise AI applications. Also very important is instant access to relevant, governed data—the role of a data harness. Through the hackathon, developers will explore how Grok Build and Zetaris can be used together to combine these two complementary harnesses to build AI-enabled workflows. We look forward to seeing what the developer community creates.”
Toni Adams, Head of Global Partnerships at SpaceXAI
“Every time enterprises copy and centralize data to build something new, they duplicate storage, compute, and networking. The world holds roughly six times more data than it actually needs, and most of that is duplication chasing a premise that was already flawed. AI is going to make that duplication far more expensive unless the underlying model changes.”
Vinay Samuel, CEO and Co-Founder of Zetaris
“AI is moving fast, but the data infrastructure underneath it hasn’t kept pace, and that gap is exactly where the real work needs to happen. What drew me to Zetaris is that the team isn’t just talking about that problem, they’ve built a way to solve it. Hosting the Open Agent Hackathon through GenAI Works and bringing that community together with Zetaris and SpaceXAI is a particularly compelling moment to get involved directly.”
Steve Nouri, AI Strategy Advisor at Zetaris and CEO and Co-Founder of GenAI Works
