Zetaris is a unique analytical data virtualization solution that simplifies and expedites data analysis. It is decentralized, so data doesn’t have to be moved into a centralized data warehouse, cloud, or lake for analysis. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Zetaris founder and CEO Vinay Samuel to learn more about the company.
Vinay Samuel’s Background
What is Vinay Samuel’s background? Samuel said:
“I started my IT career decades ago at Teradata as a marketing data expert. My career has featured senior roles as Vice President Asia of Greenplum, CEO of GridMatics, and Vice President APJ for Hewlett-Packard.”
“In 2013, I had an idea to analyze data in a totally different way – I wanted to create a data virtualization solution that massively simplifies and expedites data analysis. I wanted to come up with a solution where you don’t have to move data into a centralized data warehouse, cloud, or lake for analysis to dramatically save time, cost, and complexity and reduce errors.”
“As a father with four young children at the time, I was taking a huge gamble, but when I showed my wife what I had come up with she immediately recognized the huge potential and encouraged me to take a risk and turn down the million-dollar executive role I had on offer and leap into the unknown and launch my business. I initially bootstrapped investing in 20 developers to seed the first version of the software.”
Formation Of Zetaris
How did the idea for Zetaris come together? Samuel shared:
“In a rare pivot from being an enterprise-level technology executive and CEO who had never founded his own tech startup before, in 2013 I set up an office in my garage to work on the idea. I succeeded in creating the world’s first revolutionary analytical data fabric for enterprise reporting and analytics. That enables disparate data to be analyzed in real-time from any source without the complexity of building data lakes. Fundamentally disrupting how the rest of the industry is trying to do analytics, BI, reporting, and AI.”
“The Zetaris AI Data Hub enables Generative AI applications to have automated and real-time access to enterprise data whilst applying governance and access control. This is what’s needed if organizations are to move up the value and maturity curve for AI applications. Without the Zetaris AI Data Hub, data projects take too long (weeks and months), involve the need to move the data, and are fraught with data quality issues.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Samuel’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Samuel reflected:
“When we delivered our first project at a large bank and the CIO told us that it was the fastest data project they had ever delivered in the data analytics area. He admitted that he didn’t believe we’d deliver in the three weeks we said we would, when others were saying that the project was at least a four-month journey.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Samuel explained:
“Zetaris Cloud available on a 30-day free trial, allows you to quickly assess our SaaS platform hosted on our resilient Zetaris infrastructure.”
“Zetaris Air, the data machine to power AI can be deployed and run anywhere, as self-managed software on your cloud or on-premises infrastructure.”
“Zetaris AI Data Hub offers extensive support designed for large-scale AI and Lakehouse environments with every increasing enhanced capability.”
“Zetaris Lightning Catalogue provides an open-source framework for modern query federation and data preparation.”
“Zetaris Fluid Data Vault toolkit enables the data vault of the future by automating the integrations of big data and streaming data sources. You can go directly from source systems to a raw data vault without having to replicate the raw data across multiple storage layers.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Samuel and the team faced in building the company? Samuel noted:
“One of the biggest challenges we have faced is securing great engineers and retaining them. The competition for engineering resources is at the highest levels I’ve ever seen in the market. This is in part driven by the organization’s companies trying to “build their own” solutions. At Zetaris we have attracted great engineers by showing them how quickly we can complete the kind of projects they want to do. Contrasting larger client organizations that have lots of talent sitting around waiting for the company to get started.”
Evolution Of Zetaris’ Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Samuel noted:
“We have unveiled the Zetaris Lightning Catalog, an innovative open-source product to redefine the landscape of data management and analytics. This release is supported by leading technology innovator Nvidia, underlining a collaborative effort to drive forward the Apache Spark ecosystem.”
“We recently launched AI Bootcamp. This immersive program is designed to guide participants through the transformative process of identifying, designing, and developing AI products tailored to their business needs whilst utilizing the powerful Zetaris AI data platform.”
“The Zetaris Healthcare Studio enables improvements in triage to enable healthcare professionals to make faster decisions. By using data from thousands of previous cases, healthcare providers can determine the right treatment path faster to accelerate triage and support better resource allocation. The Zetaris Healthcare Studio is a powerful tool for more accurate disease detection.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Samuel cited:
“Zetaris customers include Telstra, NBN, Optus, Nokia, BUPA, Melbourne Water, and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. We launched Zetaris on the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace in Australia in 2020 and together have expanded into nine global markets. Zetaris is part of a global alliance with IBM, Accenture, and Ernst & Young. We are now turbocharging growth and expansion in the US.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Samuel about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We are overjoyed when we see the good our technology can achieve. The Murdoch Children’s Research Institute’s Gen-V initiative shows how our technology has been instrumental in the collation of large and complex datasets designed to integrate Victoria’s developing data linkage capacity for health research. This work will directly save the lives of thousands of children in Victoria over the coming decades.”
“We also stand out as Zetaris has a clear point of difference in the market as a true disruptor. Before our customers on-board with us, they undertook a pilot, and many times, in particular with one massive telco, they actually didn’t believe we had really done our job. We had to prove that we had done the query and show them how we achieved the results. They didn’t believe the speed of our data engine and how fast it was and that we were able to take a query that used to take them eight hours and do it in just 30 seconds! We had to prove it and break it down for them to understand how this was even possible.”
“The power of our engine is a game-changer and of a magnitude that our customers at first have difficulty believing.”
Funding
After asking Samuel about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“We recently raised $30 million, securing backing from In-Q-Tel (CIA-backed), Exto Partners, Vulpes Ventures Singapore, 72 Capital, and others. Zetaris is now valued in excess of $150 million.”
“We are now strongly pursuing expansion into the US and bringing our ground-breaking technology to the U.K, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and India.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Samuel assessed:
“We are in the data for AI market, which I believe is the most essential component for organisations that want to increase along the maturity curve of AI. In 2024, the AI TAM is predicted to be at $184 billion, growing to near a trillion by 2030.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Zetaris from its competition? Samuel affirmed:
“Zetaris AI Data Hub automates connecting, querying, joining, and transforming data in real-time in different, disparate places across the enterprise whilst applying governance and access policies. As soon as new data is available, the AI has the opportunity to become aware.”
“The way organizations currently do data for AI is slow and error-prone because they attempt to copy and move the data into large data lakes before presenting it to the AI. They do this because they need to transform and clean the data in an old-fashioned cumbersome and expensive way.”
“Zetaris leaves data in place, where it was created and transforms it as it’s queried across the network. We call this ‘Data Anywhere Analysis’ and is the fundamental capability that organizations need to be able to build deeper and more valuable AI across their business.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Zetaris’ future company goals? Samuel pointed out:
“I am delighted how fast Zetaris has grown – we are on track to build a global billion-dollar business. We are expanding and opening offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Singapore, and London and turbocharging our partnerships and global growth.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics to discuss? Samuel concluded:
“Low value from AI is the result of organizations doing “stovepipe” AI applications for a single task or some automation of a service.”
“Higher order work requires input data from all over the organization and with an AI Data Hub, they can create an automated view to that data with sophisticated transformation capabilities, organizations can create deeper role-based AI.”
“Without an AI Data Hub, where all data access for AI is managed and governed, companies are creating opportunities for risk, they are causing disparate systems to be developed that become unmanageable and will not be able to unlock full value.”
