NVIDIA GTC 2025 | Vinay Samuel, Zetaris

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Vinay Samuel

CEO

Zetaris

play_circle_outline Discovering Robert Herjavec's Impact on Zetaris' Revolutionary AI Modern Lakehouse Technology

play_circle_outline Importance of partners like Equinix in data management

play_circle_outline AI revolution benefiting future generations through automation and time-saving technology

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Vinay Samuel, Zetaris

Vinay Samuel

CEO Zetaris

Exploring the Future of AI with Vinay Samuel at Nvidia GTC 2025

In this insightful discussion, Vinay Samuel, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Zetaris, shares pivotal moments and innovative strategies that define Zetaris at Nvidia GTC 2025. They discuss the partnership with Robert Herjavec on strategy, noting the significance of this addition during the conference.

Samuel's vast expertise in data management solutions and their vision behind the Modern Lakehouse for AI are central to the conversation. Alongside Savannah Peterson, the hos... Read more

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What is some of the excitement surrounding the new data management product and leadership changes at the company? add

What is the importance of having bulletproof hosting and infrastructure when deploying AI solutions? add

What is the speaker's optimistic view on the impact of AI on humanity and how it can make us better by creating tools to assist in various industries such as healthcare, finance, and real estate? add

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Vinay Samuel, Zetaris

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, data fans, and welcome back to San Jose, California. We are here at Nvidia GTC, rocking through our very exclusive interviews in the Equinix booth. Cannot wait to introduce this next guest, Vinay from Zetaris. You are having a moment right now. Welcome to the show.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely, Savannah. Thank you so much for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's been a bit of a commute. You came over from Aussie, right?

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah. It's only 24 hours. No issue.

Savannah Peterson

>> Casual.

Vinay Samuel

>> Had a nice sleep and here we are.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, I want to talk, first of all, you started Zetaris 13 years ago.

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Long journey, I can imagine, between now and then.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Quite a combination of things happening for you right now. Talk to us about some of the excitement.

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah, look, starting with the excitement, obviously, we've landed with, I think, the game-changer for data management for enterprises, and we'll talk a lot about that, I'm sure, with our Modern Lakehouse for AI. But the big excitement is having Robert Herjavec join us and become our executive director for strategy. That's amazing. And while we're doing that, basically we've built the best product, best data platform, best Lake house. We want to get the best leadership around it. So, that's happening and then growth-

Savannah Peterson

>> Hold on. I want to stop there just for a second. A friend of yours met him in the school drop-off line, correct?

Vinay Samuel

>> Well, yeah. It was actually one of our shareholders met him, who is a banker for one of the big global banks. And basically, Robert has been on the hunt for what's the next big thing in AI. And he's super competent, super smart in cybersecurity, but also AI. And he basically knew that data is the biggest problem, getting data right, getting enterprise data in a form that AI can consume it. So, he's been looking for a company that's on the data side of AI. And it was school drop off, you're right. Dropping the kids off he asked this question and our name popped up. It was unbelievable.

Savannah Peterson

>> What was it like for you when you got the phone call that your name had popped up in that moment?

Vinay Samuel

>> I actually thought it was a prank. So, I said, "No way." I basically hung up on... It was one of our directors saying, "Hey, you know the Shark Tank guy, Robert?" I said, "Oh, well, he's the best, right? He's the guy I'm always watching." "Well, he wants to have dinner with us." And I said, "Yeah, sure, Will. See you later," right?

Savannah Peterson

>> "Yeah, cool. See you at dinner."

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah, yeah. "See you. No worries." But yeah, I went to dinner, still very skeptical thinking, "No way. Can't be..." In Sydney, we've got a lot of sharks in Sydney, but not from the Shark Tank. And he turned up and, yeah, wonderful dinner, got to know him and amazing person, very down to earth. And fell in love with our idea and the concept and the way we're bringing AI to the data, not having to move data to AI. He just loved that concept. And well, we've announced it now and he's on the team, so we're super happy.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations. Super happy. Well, and it's clear that you've got a really compelling offering. Other folks playing in the data space obviously. But when we think about a Modern Lakehouse for AI, talk to me about how Zetaris is so differentiated.

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah, so the reason I started the company was I was at these big data platform companies, like Teradata, Greenplum, worked at HP, NCR and so on and so forth. And the common theme was that customers would restart their data project every two to three years. So, basically, their requirement got bigger and bigger and couldn't fit the current industry platform capabilities. And I asked myself in a little think tank the question, "What's going on? Why is it every few years the customers are back in the market?" And the same thing's happening with the current data platforms, what we call the legacy data platforms, cloud data and even in the data center, customers are continually looking for the next big thing. And so, we started building out this data platform that would automate the data engineering, that would actually not need to move data to a central location, and basically, be able to deal with data in place. So, we actually send the query to the data or we send AI to where the data is to solve the business question. We call that the Modern Lakehouse for AI. So, yeah, 13 years ago, we had this huge vision of changing the way data was managed in the enterprise. Took us a long time. We landed on it about three years ago in terms of a full solution. And today, we believe we're revolutionizing large companies by joining their data in place, layering over the current data layer and in real time, bringing data together in real time, solving for data quality. And then, extreme automation, I call it, where our competitors need armies of engineers, need all of this tooling and kit to make it work, we're using AI to automate all the way from connecting to data, transforming it, creating the view for AI or BI and delivering the value.

Savannah Peterson

>> And it's that real-time experience that makes the magic of AI real.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely. Well, I think it's more than magic. I think for the high-value use cases of AI, you need real-time access. Think of a hospital trying to use AI for triage assessment or triage copilot. You can't have the data even 10 minutes old. It needs to be the data now. So, our Modern Lakehouse for AI is a real time lake house connected to data wherever it is, whether it's on the edge, whether it's in the data center, in the cloud. We are location-agnostic and that makes it a powerful solution.

Savannah Peterson

>> I can see why Robert is so excited.

Vinay Samuel

>> Oh, he loves it. And coming from his cybersecurity pedigree, he understood that meeting the requirement at 100%... With security, it's not 99%, 95%. Meeting the solution requirement 100% is the game-changer, is how you break industries and break in. And we believe we've met 100% of the AI requirement for data in the enterprise.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. Who doesn't want a perfect score? 100% is the way to do it.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Talk to me a little bit about the role of partners and players, like Equinix and working with them and what that's meant for you?

Vinay Samuel

>> Vital for us. So, the ecosystem is what makes the whole thing work. It's one plus one equals 10. When you actually bring the best-of-breed solutions to the customer. And so, particularly with AI, you can't have anything other than bulletproof hosting off your capabilities, bulletproof infrastructure behind the software layer. And I was talking to someone about this, the difference between BI and AI. So, our legacy competitors grew up in the BI world, where you could take overnight to load your data, you could even take an hour to be current. If your reports didn't turn up, did it really matter? The bank wouldn't stop if the dashboards weren't ready. But in the AI phase, it's absolutely critical because AI is your business. So, you need to have bulletproof high-availability data centers, infrastructure, behind anything you're doing with AI. And that's why we are partnering with Equinix, we're partnering with the likes of Hitachi, Cisco. We've attracted some of the big players very quickly to this whole idea of taking AI to the data and bringing down the cost. The inferencing moment is so much quicker. So, yeah, partners are critical to our model. And in fact, we have a partner sales team. So, we don't sell direct. We sell through our partners.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, that's convenient. That helps keep you lean.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely. Helps us scale. So, we worked out through our partner ecosystem, we're launching with 44,000 sellers-

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, my goodness....

Vinay Samuel

>> which is just phenomenal, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> It is.

Vinay Samuel

>> And that's with Cisco, Hitachi, Equinix coming together to bring this Modern Lakehouse for AI in an AI-enabled data center, like Equinix. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> We had a touching human moment as we were getting started.

Vinay Samuel

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> You and I are both dyslexic.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely. Both dyslexic.

Savannah Peterson

>> Shout out to our neuro-spicy friends.

Vinay Samuel

>> Don't let it stop you. It's a superpower, I say. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, talk to me a little bit about why you think it's a superpower and how that superpower has helped you build this company.

Vinay Samuel

>> Well, it's a few things. So, one of my sons is dyslexic as well. And I do say to him, "It's a superpower," from my experience. The first thing is to really understand technology, you've got to go deep and to go deep, you've got to go slow. So, it makes me read slow and I've always read slow, but the overall time to deep understanding is much quicker than my peers, I've found. Some of my peers. So, that ability to really slow yourself down and to understand and not just quickly read, that's a huge advantage. The other thing, as I was saying to you, it forces you to build relationships, right? Because you want to know what's going on if something flashes up in front of you really quickly. And nothing better than looking at someone saying, "Hey, what was that on the board?" And that's how I grew up at school, by being close to my peers in terms of understanding some of the written tech. So, I have a textual advantage with my dyslexia. So, asking someone, "What's that on the board," helped me build those-

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, curiosity gets you a long way too.

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> I mean it's the relationships, it's the curiosity.

Vinay Samuel

>> What about yourself? How did you-

Savannah Peterson

>> It's the openness. Ooh, I think for me it's always been... Thank you for asking me a question. I think it's always been, I can see the forest through the trees. The more of the big picture I can see, it's very easy for me to then navigate what a larger strategy should be, versus worrying about those little tiny details.

Vinay Samuel

>> Interesting. The thing with me, it's actually the reverse for me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Interesting.

Vinay Samuel

>> It's pattern recognition. I find I'm seeing patterns that others miss. And as I was saying to you, I used to actually be the guy on the team that would look at broken code and find the problem really quickly, because I think something to do with that advantage of being dyslexic.

Savannah Peterson

>> That pattern matching is definitely our thing. Yeah, so I think that's why I see it big, you see it small together. I mean next time you're starting a company, call me up. We'll-

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely. Let's get together. We'll call it D-Squared, all right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. Oh, my God. And we'll hire your son.

Vinay Samuel

>> Yeah, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> One final question for you. What a really interesting time. And since you mentioned your children, and I know that kids are a big part of how you ended up with Robert-

Vinay Samuel

>> Absolutely....

Savannah Peterson

>> which is very exciting. What do you hope our AI revolution that we're currently amidst in, and all of your hard work, quite frankly, does for your family and for your kids' generation?

Vinay Samuel

>> I'm super optimistic. I think AI makes us better, it really does. And humanity always works out... We're a tool-based being. We look for the best tools. We always work out how to use things for our advantage in the end. And there may be ebbs and flows of is this going to be something that's bad for us or good for us? But ultimately, it's going to augment how they do things. It's going to speed up time to value for them and time to learning. In the use cases that we have at Zetaris, so we're working with hospital groups, creating AI nursing assistants.

Savannah Peterson

>> Amazing.

Vinay Samuel

>> We are working with banks, creating AI mortgage brokers. Property groups, AI property assessors. All of those use cases are making the humans better and giving back time to humans. So, in the hospital example, the nurse now has more time for caring and doesn't worry about the admin stuff that they didn't go to college to learn. They went to learn how to care. So, I'm really optimistic. I think it's going to be an amazing world they'll live in.

Savannah Peterson

>> I agree with you. I can't wait to help shape it and help watch it. And more importantly, to help see what you all do to make that possible. Vinay, thank you so much for taking the time.

Vinay Samuel

>> Thank you so much, Savannah.

Savannah Peterson

>> This has been a joy.

Vinay Samuel

>> I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, me too. And thank all of you for tuning in, especially to our neurodiverse friends who are hopefully feeling as inspired as I am after this fantastic conversation. We're here at Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.