Former Hitachi Vantara executives Ashish Bhagat and Phil Vadon join as CFO and CRO, bringing a track record of building multi-hundred-million-dollar businesses from the ground up

SAN FRANCISCO, May 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Zetaris, the Open Agentic Lakehouse company, today announced the appointment of Ashish Bhagat as Chief Financial Officer and Phil Vadon as Chief Revenue Officer. Both appointments are global in scope, as Zetaris accelerates its expansion across North America and international markets.

The appointments arrive at a defining moment for enterprise data. With hyperscalers committing $725 billion to AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, the race to AI-powered enterprise operations is no longer a future strategy — it is a present-day competitive imperative. Yet analysts and enterprise technology leaders consistently identify the same bottleneck: AI projects stall not because the models are insufficient, but because the underlying data is fragmented, siloed, and not ready for agents to act on. The agentic lakehouse category — which enables AI agents to access, query, and activate enterprise data in place, without duplication or complex data movement — has rapidly emerged as the critical infrastructure layer separating organizations that can execute on AI from those that cannot. Zetaris is the Control Plane for that layer.

The announcement marks a significant moment for Zetaris. Bhagat and Vadon are not new to each other or to building businesses at scale. Over nearly two decades together at Hitachi Vantara, they conceived, funded, and scaled two of the most successful business units in the company's history, taking each from concept to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

"When leaders of this caliber choose to make their next bet on a company, the market pays attention," said Vinay Samuel, CEO and Founder of Zetaris. "Ashish and Phil have competed and won at the highest levels of the global technology industry. They know how to scale businesses, how to build revenue engines, and how to execute with discipline. Their decision to join Zetaris reflects what we have built and the size of the opportunity ahead. Together, they give us the firepower to take the Open Agentic Lakehouse to every market in the world."

A Shared Track Record of Building at Scale

At Hitachi Vantara, Vadon and Bhagat jointly built two businesses that stand as benchmarks in enterprise technology.

The first was the Financial Services vertical. Vadon led the commercial build, growing the business to over $400 million in revenue within four years. Under his leadership, Hitachi Vantara captured a 44 percent market share, based on like-for-like storage TAM, in the financial center of the world, New York, adding landmark accounts including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, UBS, and Credit Suisse. Bhagat provided the financial architecture and capital strategy that made that growth sustainable and scalable.

The second was the Managed Services and XaaS business. Working together, they built the business with bookings exceeding $1 billion. They designed the commercial model, secured the investment, and executed the go-to-market strategy that turned a concept into a major revenue franchise.

That shared experience of conceiving, funding, and executing high-growth businesses is what Zetaris is now bringing to bear on its global expansion.

Ashish Bhagat, Chief Financial Officer

Mr. Bhagat brings over 25 years of executive leadership experience in financial strategy, corporate transformation, and global operations to Zetaris. In his most recent role as Chief Operating Officer at Hitachi Vantara, he was responsible for overseeing the company's business operations, financial performance, and transformation strategies, playing a critical role in optimizing pricing strategies, deal structuring, IT and security governance, and integrated business analytics. Prior to this, he served as Chief Transformation Officer for the Digital Infrastructure Business Unit, where he led organizational realignments, financial restructuring, and global cost optimization initiatives that significantly improved business margins and long-term growth prospects.

Before stepping into these roles, Mr. Bhagat held several high-impact positions within the Hitachi group, including SVP Finance Strategy and Operations and Chief Transformation Officer, Finance at Hitachi Ltd. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Business-Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is a Certified Public Accountant.

"Throughout my career, the companies that outperformed were those that turned data into a genuine competitive advantage. AI is now the accelerant, but only if the underlying data is trustworthy, accessible, and timely. That is the non-negotiable foundation for any finance or operations leader serious about driving performance," said Mr. Bhagat. "Zetaris is uniquely positioned at the intersection of two forces every enterprise is grappling with: the need to scale AI and the need to control cost and data governance. As CFO, I see the platform not just as a technology investment but as a strategic lever for enterprise value creation. I have spent 25 years optimizing how companies deploy capital. Zetaris is the kind of bet I would have pushed for from the other side of the table."

Phil Vadon, Chief Revenue Officer

Mr. Vadon brings deep global expertise in managed services, cloud solutions, and go-to-market strategy to Zetaris. Most recently serving as VP and General Manager of IaaS at Hitachi Vantara, he has held a series of senior leadership roles across the industry, building and scaling businesses in highly competitive technology markets. Mr. Vadon has a proven track record of building high-performance teams, driving revenue growth, building strategic channel partnerships, and delivering exceptional customer outcomes at scale. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Manhattan University and co-founded a communications software company earlier in his career, giving him both the commercial and entrepreneurial instincts that define the best revenue leaders.

"Having worked alongside Zetaris partners and enterprise accounts for the past 18 months, I have seen no other solution that accelerates outcomes and time to value as consistently as the Open Agentic Lakehouse," said Mr. Vadon. "Vinay and the team have built something that is genuinely differentiated, and I am looking forward to the challenge of scaling an organization to take it to a wider audience. The opportunity to bring solutions that exceed customers' immediate and long-term strategic needs is exactly the kind of challenge I am here for."

About Zetaris

Zetaris is the Open Agentic Lakehouse — the Control Plane for enterprise AI. Built on an open, vendor-agnostic architecture, Zetaris enables organizations to query, govern, and activate their data in place, across every source and system they own, without data movement, ETL pipelines, or proprietary lock-in. Every AI agent, analyst, and application gets governed, real-time access to enterprise 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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SOURCE Zetaris