NexusOne triples its business in 2026, names Ken Pickering SVP of Engineering to scale the AI & Data Control Plane

Pickering, who led engineering at Starburst Data and served as CTO at Hopper and Scripta Insights, joins on the heels of NexusOne's general availability and the launch of its AI & Data Control Plane, now standing up at customers including a top-ten US bank

ATLANTA, Aug. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- NexusOne, the first fully integrated AI and Data Control Plane, today announced that Ken Pickering has joined the company as Senior Vice President of Engineering. With the growth of AI adoption across enterprises, NexusOne's annual recurring revenue (ARR) has roughly tripled over the past six months, and its platform now runs in production at leading companies in financial services, healthcare, insurance, and telecommunications. Pickering joins in response to that growth to lead the engineering organization as NexusOne scales the AI & Data Control Plane, the governed layer for enterprise AI it introduced earlier this year 

"Every conversation with a data leader right now ends in the same question: when can you start?" said Anu Jain, Founder and CEO of NexusOne. "The market is moving toward a view we committed to early: that enterprises should own their AI, agents, data, and compute rather than rent intelligence from others, and that governance has to be built in from the start. Those are the principles NexusOne was designed around. The constraint on our growth has quickly become engineering capacity. Ken has scaled engineering organizations through their fastest growth periods, run ML at consumer scale, and shipped AI under healthcare regulation. He is the rare leader who has done all three, and the right person to help us meet a market that is moving quickly to our view of what AI-ready means for data."

Pickering brings more than 20 years of engineering leadership experience. At Starburst he led engineering for the platform to let enterprises query data across warehouses, lakes, and on-prem systems without moving it. NexusOne extends that federation principle into a full control layer that runs infrastructure, data, and AI in sync and governs the whole estate, legacy, on-prem, and cloud alike, while remaining fully composable, so enterprises can adopt any feature without being forced into whole platforms in the future. As CTO of Hopper, he built the machine learning infrastructure behind airfare prediction for millions of travelers, and as CTO of Scripta Insights he led engineering and AI in healthcare, where data governance is critical for regulation.

"I spent my Starburst years watching sophisticated enterprises stall on AI for the same reason: their models needed governed access to data spread across every system they own, and no platform existed at the time to give it to them," said Pickering. "NexusOne has built that layer, adding a critical control plane on top of it all that governs how every AI request gets served and what it costs. The platform already runs at a top-three US bank, and the control plane is currently standing up at another major European bank. Engineering leaders rarely get to scale infrastructure this early with production proof already behind it."

Scaling the team behind the first AI & Data Control Plane

The NexusOne AI & Data Control Plane is a single governed boundary over every model, engine, user, and agent in an enterprise data estate. It routes each AI request on intent and identity to the right kind of compute: a query engine for deterministic work, an existing ML pipeline for predictions, a small model for narrow tasks, and a frontier model only when the work is generative. Repeat questions are answered from cache, so they cost nothing; out-of-policy requests are blocked before they reach a model or the data, and every decision is logged. Where AI gateways route between models and governance tools police a single system, NexusOne does both. It secures every model and every data system through one identity layer and runs as a live console today.

A top-three US bank connected 30 AI applications to the governed layer in under four weeks and eliminated more than $100 million in license and hardware costs. A full cross-estate deployment stands up in under five hours. Pickering's mandate is to grow the engineering organization to match that demand, expanding the control plane's routing and governance capabilities and building the automation that makes each new deployment faster than the last.

NexusOne is hiring across teams. Visit nx1.io to learn more.

About NexusOne

NexusOne is the first AI-native data layer: infrastructure built for the AI era from day zero. A universal control plane that lies horizontally across the entire data estate, NexusOne connects legacy, on-prem, and cloud systems through one universal identity, governance, and operational layer. Built on 85+ deeply integrated open-source tools, NexusOne gets enterprises AI-ready in weeks rather than years, with Embedded Builders who guarantee outcomes. Currently powering data and AI workloads at major financial institutions, healthcare organizations, and Fortune 500 enterprises. Backed by Insight Partners. Learn more at nx1.io. 

SOURCE NexusOne