For enterprise AI, build on customer infrastructure—data gravity wins over convenience
Cotera's key differentiation from cloud-based competitors: AI agents run on top of enterprise data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery). Series B+ companies don't want to send their data to third-party cloud solutions—they want AI that sits on their existing infrastructure, accesses internal data, calls LLM providers, and lands results back inside company infrastructure. Data gravity is real: enterprises have spent years building their data warehouse, setting up permissions, ensuring compliance. A product that works with that infrastructure wins over products that require data extraction. This unlocks deals that cloud-only tools cannot win—CIOs will choose 'runs on our Snowflake' over 'send data to our cloud' every time.
When to use
Use this approach when targeting Series B+ enterprise customers with mature data infrastructure. Instead of requiring data to come to your platform, bring your platform to their data. Build native integrations with Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks—wherever enterprise data lives. Accept that data won't leave their walls.
Don't do this
Building cloud-only solutions that require enterprise customers to replicate/export data to your platform, creating security/compliance/performance concerns. Or dismissing enterprise data warehouses as 'legacy' when they're actually critical infrastructure that enterprises have invested heavily in and won't abandon.
1 Founder Who Did This
Built AI agents that run on top of customer data warehouses (Snowflake/Redshift/BigQuery) instead of requiring data export to Cotera's cloud. Data stays inside company infrastructure; agents access it, call LLM providers, land results back internally.