About Vakamo

The infrastructure of authority

Vakamo builds the control plane that makes every AI and data decision authorized, auditable and reproducible — enforced at the infrastructure layer, on open standards.

Mission

Make trust the default for AI and data

AI adoption won't be limited by model intelligence — it will be limited by auditable infrastructure. Vakamo is the plumbing of trust that lets regulated enterprises deploy AI at scale without taking on unmanageable liability.

The gap we close

Governance covers a fraction of what AI reads

20%
Deterministic layer

Governed SQL tables, warehouses and dbt models — governable today.

~80%
Probabilistic lake

Documents, files, embeddings and logs — where AI actually works, largely ungoverned (industry estimate) .

Vakamo provides one stateful authority that treats a row in a table and a file in a bucket with the same rigor — so governance follows the data, not the engine.

Principles

How we build

Infrastructure, not interface

We don't just observe problems — we enforce solutions. Credential vending moves security from a post-hoc audit to an infrastructure-level guarantee.

Open, not locked in

Built on the Apache Iceberg REST standard and engine-agnostic — governance follows your data, never a single vendor’s engine.

The whole lake

Structured tables and unstructured files get the same rigor — one authority for everything your people and AI actually read.

Roadmap

Building the control plane for AI and data

One open, engine-agnostic control plane for the entire lakehouse — structured and unstructured — so enterprises stay AI-ready with no governance bottleneck.

  1. Available today

    Trust infrastructure for your tables

    Iceberg-native control plane — credential vending and access control for structured data. Open governance, not locked to any engine.

  2. In progress

    One control plane for the whole lake

    Extend the same governance to unstructured data — documents, files and embeddings — plus lineage and traceability, delivered as fully-managed Lakekeeper Cloud (SaaS).

  3. Next

    The compliance platform for AI agents

    Make enterprises AI-ready with no governance bottleneck — risk avoidance and audit built in, so AI agents scale with agility.

The vision: a federated control plane where every AI decision is traceable from raw input to final answer — making agent-scale automation safe, compliant and agile.

Team

Founding team

Viktor Kessler
CEO

15+ years across data architecture and enterprise IT strategy (PwC, SAP) and sales (Dremio, MongoDB).

Christian Thiel
CTO

10+ years in data engineering, data science and platform design. OSS contributor (Iceberg, Airflow).

Advisors

Our advisors

Chris Riccomini
General Partner — Materialized View Capital
Kevin Liu
Apache Iceberg PMC