Starburst Announces Winners of the 2026 AI & Data Visionary Awards at AI & Datanova Miami

Awards honor customers and partners who are redefining what’s possible with data and AI

MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Starburst, a leading enterprise intelligence platform, today announced the winners of the 2026 AI & Data Visionary Awards at its annual conference, AI & Datanova 2026, in Miami, Florida. The awards honor customers and partners who are harnessing data and AI to deliver transformative results, accelerate innovation, and shape the future of their industries.

The awards celebrate achievements across six customer categories and four partner categories, recognizing visionaries whose leadership and execution are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Starburst.

Customer Award Winners

AI & Data Visionary Award — GEICO
Starburst’s highest honor goes to Bala Natarajan of GEICO — a leader who isn’t just experimenting with AI, but rearchitecting for it. GEICO is orchestrating AI agents across internal systems and customer products, embracing multi-agent design and open standards like MCPs while most enterprises are still connecting isolated use cases.

Executive Visionary Award — Vikas Agarwal, Citizens Financial Group
The Executive Visionary Award goes to Vikas Agarwal, SVP, Head of Enterprise Data Platforms, for building one of financial services’ most sophisticated AI-ready data architectures. His team uses Starburst not as a query engine, but as the central foundation for federated access across the enterprise, with governance, pipelines, and a conversational agentic layer on top. The result is a scalable, AI-ready platform built for how Citizens Financial Group will operate for years to come.

Data^AI Award — Highmark Health
The Data^AI Award goes to Nik Acheson of Highmark Health for making AI innovation self-sustaining in one of the most complex environments imaginable. His playbook — fund innovation through efficiency gains, rationalize the platform, and commit to open architectures — has moved Highmark well beyond pilots and set a standard for disciplined, scalable AI progress.

Impact Through AI Award — Vizient
The Impact Through AI Award goes to Ram Radhakrishnan and Vizient for turning fragmented healthcare data into a force for better patient care. With Starburst, Vizient has built an internal data marketplace on a data mesh foundation — letting teams across clinical operations, supply chain, and quality rapidly discover and combine data into governed, reusable products that deliver faster insights to healthcare organizations nationwide.

Data Disrupter Award — Spreetail
The Data Disrupter Award goes to Brock Butler at Spreetail, who led a team that overhauled a cost-heavy, siloed data architecture to Starburst Galaxy as the query engine powering AI, ML, and internal applications — all within just six months.

Data Pathfinder Award — Pedro Almeida, Inter&Co
The Data Pathfinder Award goes to Pedro Almeida of Inter&Co for charting a new course in data democratization at one of Brazil’s fastest-growing digital banks. Replacing a costly, constrained query environment with Starburst Enterprise, Inter transformed data access from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage — giving thousands of data consumers self-service access to 34+ petabytes of data, without ever needing to call on the data team.

Partner Award Winners

Enablement Partner of the Year — Datacouch
Datacouch is recognized as Starburst’s 2026 Enablement Partner of the Year for their deep commitment to education and enablement — delivering instructor-led Starburst training and helping teams around the world build practical skills. Acting as an extension of the Starburst team, Datacouch has been instrumental in providing delivery capacity and customer coverage in key regions, helping Starburst meet growing demand.

OEM Partner of the Year — Dell Technologies
Starburst recognizes Dell Technologies as the 2026 OEM Partner of the Year. Starburst and the Dell AI Data Platform partnership lets enterprises run analytics directly where data lives — no costly migrations, no bottlenecks. Together, they’ve turned data from a storage challenge into a competitive asset, delivering cloud-like speed with the security and cost-predictability of on-premises infrastructure.

AI Visionary Partner of the Year — NVIDIA
NVIDIA is recognized as the 2026 AI Visionary Partner of the Year. As agentic AI workloads raise the stakes for data infrastructure — demanding faster, more reliable, and more governed access to enterprise data — the combination of Starburst’s Enterprise Intelligence Platform with NVIDIA GPU acceleration unlocks a new tier of performance and possibility.

Emerging Partner of the Year — Artefact
Artefact is named the 2026 Emerging Partner of the Year. From data foundations to autonomous agents that reason and execute end-to-end workflows, Artefact is the AI-Native services partner that covers the full journey. Paired with Starburst's data and AI platform, Artefact brings the talent, the methodology, and the delivery muscle to build a governed, AI-ready enterprise - from blueprint to production.

“Data and AI are the engines of transformation across every industry,” said Matt Fuller, Co-Founder at Starburst. “The winners of this year’s AI & Data Visionary Awards exemplify what’s possible when bold vision, strong leadership, and execution come together with the power of Starburst. We’re proud to celebrate these customers and partners who are setting the standard for enterprise AI.”

About Starburst

Starburst delivers enterprise intelligence at scale by giving organizations secure, governed access to all their data, wherever it lives. Built for distributed data environments across on-premises systems, multiple clouds, and hybrid architectures, Starburst helps enterprises power AI and analytics without the cost and complexity of traditional data consolidation.

By enabling federated access to complete enterprise context, Starburst helps AI platforms, applications, and teams move from pilots to production with trusted, actionable data. Built on open standards with Trino and Apache Iceberg, Starburst integrates with existing technologies while helping organizations avoid vendor lock-in. For more information, visit starburst.ai.