Steve Nouri joins Zetaris as company prepares to showcase its technology at large-scale global hackathon in October

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Zetaris, a leading data harness for AI, today announced the launch of Zetaris Cloud and its AI Data Harness, along with two developments that put the technology to the test: Steve Nouri, one of the most recognized names in global AI, has joined the company, and Zetaris has become a SpaceXAI Partner Network Transformation Partner. Zetaris and SpaceXAI will headline the Open Agent Hackathon 2026, celebrating the acceleration of AI for the enterprise, taking place October 22-27.

The conundrum: coding got fast, enterprise data didn't

AI coding harnesses have compressed months of software development into minutes. A developer can now generate working code almost as fast as they can describe what they want built.

Enterprise data has not kept pace. It is scattered across cloud, on-premises and edge systems, often in formats too inconsistent to trust once pulled together. Reaching it safely still takes weeks of centralization work, or it doesn't happen at all, leaving AI agents to operate on partial or stale information. That gap, not a lack of coding capability, is why so many enterprise AI initiatives stall between a working prototype and something a business can rely on.

The solve: a data harness for the other half of the stack

Zetaris built its AI Data Harness to close that gap directly, while lowering total cost of ownership by up to 67 percent¹. It lets AI systems query enterprise data in place across structured, unstructured and streaming sources, without first moving or duplicating it, and without waiting on a centralization project to finish. Consistent security, policy and access controls travel with the data wherever it's queried, so speed doesn't come at the expense of trust.

"Coding harnesses have dramatically accelerated software development, but enterprise AI still struggles to access trustworthy, governed data," said Vinay Samuel, CEO and co-founder of Zetaris. "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."

Zetaris Cloud delivers this federated architecture as a cloud-based service, so organizations can connect AI models and agents to their existing data environments without being locked into a particular cloud, data platform or AI model.

By reducing the need to copy and centralize data in the first place, Zetaris also aims to cut the storage, compute and energy infrastructure required to support enterprise AI. Over time, the company envisions more processing happening close to where data is created, including across edge-device networks, rather than routing every workload through centralized data centers.

Proof at scale: Zetaris and SpaceXAI headline a global hackathon

Developers will put the AI Data Harness to work during the Open Agent Hackathon 2026, a 144-hour online event hosted by GenAI Works and celebrating the acceleration of AI for the enterprise. More than 5,000 builders from over 100 countries are expected to participate, pairing SpaceXAI's Grok Build with the Zetaris AI Data Harness to build applications that use distributed enterprise data securely and in real time.

"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," Samuel said. "The hackathon is designed to move that idea from theory into working applications."

"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, SpaceXAI

What it means for the industry: an energy and infrastructure reckoning

Samuel points to a broader consequence of how the industry has handled data to date: the environmental and infrastructure cost of constantly copying and centralizing it.

"Every time enterprises copy and centralize data to build something new, they duplicate storage, compute, and networking," Samuel said. "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. "

Steve Nouri joins Zetaris

Zetaris also announced that Steve Nouri, CEO and co-founder of GenAI Works, has joined the company as AI Strategy Advisor. Nouri is the CEO and co-founder of GenAI Works, the world's largest AI community and organizer of the Open Agent Hackathon, and is widely regarded as one of the top 10 global authorities in artificial intelligence and data science. He is an advisor to the Harvard Business Review advisory council, and a LinkedIn Top Voice with more than two million followers across his platforms. Nouri previously led data science teams at CSIRO's Data61 and the Australian Computer Society, was named Australia's ICT Professional of the Year (Gold Disruptor), and is the founder of AI4Diversity, a global nonprofit supporting underrepresented talent in AI. He holds a master's degree in IT and data analytics from the University of Technology Sydney.

"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," said Nouri. "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."

Nouri's arrival comes as another high-profile addition to a team that continues to draw prominent names from outside traditional enterprise software as the company scales.

Hackathon at a Glance: Open Agent Hackathon 2026

• Dates: October 22-27, 2026 (144 hours)
• Format: Fully online
• Host: GenAI Works
• Headline collaboration: Zetaris and SpaceXAI
• Expected participation: 5,000+ builders from 100+ countries
• Prize pool: $20,000
• Focus: Building enterprise AI applications using SpaceXAI's coding harness paired with the Zetaris AI Data Harness

¹ Internal measurement based on pre and post enterprise customer assessment

About Zetaris

Zetaris is the world's leading data harness for AI — the open, vendor-agnostic layer that harnesses an organization's data engines and AI models so every agent, analyst, and application can build on enterprise data instantly. Zetaris lets teams query, govern, and activate their data in place, across every source and system they own, without data movement, ETL pipelines, or proprietary lock-in. By harnessing underlying engines such as Spark, Presto, and Trino, Zetaris delivers governed, real-time access to data wherever it lives — with full sovereignty over security, cost, and compliance. As enterprises face mounting pressure to deliver AI ROI on fragmented, distributed data estates, Zetaris provides the open data infrastructure that turns that ambition into measurable outcomes. For more information, visit www.zetaris.com. 

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