Acceldata is focusing on European growth with its xLake Autonomous Data & AI platform. The company is responding to demand from large organizations seeking to apply AI to their data while also meeting requirements for data sovereignty and control. New senior executives are set to accelerate the company’s expansion in EMEA.
Ali Afsar joins as senior vice president of data strategy, bringing over 25 years of experience at HSBC. Colin Fernandes becomes director of EMEA market development & global sales enablement, following previous roles at Sumo Logic and VMware. Justyn Goodenough, vice president of EMEA, is further expanding the team.
Acceldata’s approach centers on bringing compute, governance, and data quality to where the data resides. This eliminates the need for data to move back and forth unnecessarily between cloud and hybrid environments. Customers can run their AI alongside their data and choose the most efficient model for each task. According to the company, it processes more than one trillion data events daily across seven of the 12 largest banks, among others.
Sovereignty as a governance issue
According to CEO and founder Rohit Choudhary, the urgency is high. “Enterprises realize that embarking on a multi-year data migration effort when the world is changing every six months is a recipe for getting left behind.” For European companies, he says, data sovereignty is increasingly becoming a topic for the boardroom.
A survey conducted by GLG in May 2026 on behalf of Acceldata among C-level executives highlights the key issues. Eighty percent of companies operate hybrid data infrastructures, and 75 percent use four or more data platforms in production. Additionally, 47 percent cited cross-lake governance as one of the biggest challenges for AI. Acceldata will showcase the platform on September 17 at Autonomous London.
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