SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 6, 2026--
Arango, the company pioneering the live Contextual Data Layer for enterprise AI, today announced it has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Multimodel Data Platforms, Q2 2026. According to the report, Arango is "well-suited to organizations seeking a contextual data foundation where multihop graph performance and verifiable reasoning are mission-critical for trusted AI."
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The recognition comes at a time when enterprises are increasingly focused on how to create and operationalize business context for AI. As organizations move beyond experimentation and into production deployments of AI agents, assistants, and applications, many are reevaluating architectures built from separate databases, vector stores, search engines, and integration layers in favor of platforms that simplify how business context is connected, governed, and made available to AI systems.
Arango believes the recognition reflects growing enterprise demand for a unified approach to multimodel data management. According to the evaluation, Arango received the highest possible scores in the criteria of adoption and unified multimodel architecture.
"As organizations move AI initiatives into production, many are discovering that the challenge is no longer simply connecting data. The challenge is creating trusted business context that AI systems can reason over consistently," said Ravi Marwaha, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product & Technology Officer, Arango. "Enterprises increasingly want a simpler way to build, govern, and operationalize business context across their data landscape. We believe this recognition reflects growing demand for unified platforms that help organizations create a trusted foundation for enterprise AI."
Why It Matters
At scale, enterprise AI is fundamentally a trusted business context challenge. AI agents, assistants, and applications must understand how customers, products, policies, processes, and operational events relate to one another. Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to create this context once, govern it centrally, and make it available across AI initiatives rather than rebuilding it repeatedly.
Agentic AI systems increasingly require access to multiple forms of data, including relationships, documents, vectors, search results, and operational records. As a result, technology leaders are seeking platforms that can:
Rather than managing separate systems for each workload, organizations are increasingly seeking a simpler foundation for intelligent applications, assistants, and AI agents.
Recognition for a Contextual Data Foundation
In its evaluation, Forrester cited Arango's native multimodel architecture, which combines unified storage, execution, and schema propagation within a single engine. The report also noted Arango's integrated AI capabilities, which combine graph, vector, and document data in a single retrieval path with source citations.
Arango believes these capabilities are increasingly important as organizations seek to build AI systems capable of reasoning across connected enterprise data while maintaining transparency, governance, explainablity and trust.
Built on a graph-native multimodel foundation, the Arango Contextual Data Platform unifies graph, vector, document, key-value, and search capabilities into a single distributed engine. The platform enables organizations to create a live Contextual Data Layer, a persistent, governed representation of business context that can be reused across AI systems across the enterprise.
Building Trusted AI Starts with Trusted Business Context
As enterprises expand AI initiatives across products, workflows, and business functions, data foundations must support more than performance. They must also provide explainability, governance, traceability, and operational scalability.
Arango believes multimodel data platforms play an increasingly important role in enabling organizations to build context once and reuse it across AI systems, helping reduce duplication, improve consistency, and accelerate deployment.
Resources
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivityhere.
About Arango
Arango is pioneering the live Contextual Data Layer for enterprise AI, helping organizations transform fragmented enterprise data into trusted, reusable business context that enables AI agents, assistants, and applications to reason, decide, and act with greater accuracy, explainability, and trust at scale.
Built on the Arango Contextual Data Platform—a graph-native multimodel data foundation that unifies graph, vector, document, key-value, and full-text search capabilities with ACID guarantees—the live Contextual Data Layer enables organizations to build context once and reuse it across AI initiatives.
The platform includes more than 20 built-in AI services for contextual modeling, retrieval, orchestration, and enterprise AI development. The result is more accurate decisions, greater explainability, end-to-end traceability, faster deployment, and increased trust in enterprise AI outcomes.
Organizations including NVIDIA, HPE, Zscaler, London Stock Exchange Group, Siemens, the U.S. Air Force, NIH, Articul8, and others rely on Arango to power enterprise AI. Learn more at arango.ai.
Company: Arango
Announcement: Named a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: Multimodel Data Platforms, Q2 2026
Category: Multimodel Data Platforms (MMDPs)
Target Users: Chief Information Officers (CIOs), Chief Technology Officers (CTOs), Chief Data Officers (CDOs) Chief Data & AI Officers (CDAOs), Chief AI Officers, Enterprise Architecture Leaders and Data Management teams
Primary Use Case: Building trusted enterprise AI with a live Contextual Data Layer that connects enterprise data, relationships, governance, and operational context
Key Differentiator: Native multimodel architecture combining graph, vector, document, key-value and full-text search capabilities in a single platform
Platform Snapshot:
Recognition Highlights: Strong customer adoption, customer success, customer retention, multimodel utilization, unified architecture across graph, vector, document, key-value, and search workloads, and support for multihop graph performance and verifiable reasoning for trusted AI.
Why This Matters: Organizations need trusted business context to deploy AI agents, assistants, and applications reliably, explainably, and at enterprise scale, with the transparency and governance required for trusted AI.
Source: The Forrester Wave™: Multimodel Data Platforms, Q2 2026
Arango Recognized as a Strong Performer in Multimodel Data Platforms, Q2 2026 Evaluation
A weeklong preliminary hearing for the man accused of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk is set to get underway on Monday. Prosecutors will aim to show that they have enough evidence against 23-year-old Tyler Robinson to proceed to a trial. The hearing marks the most significant presentation of evidence in the case so far. After the hearing concludes, state District Judge Tony Graf must determine if the case should proceed.
Robinson is charged with aggravated murder in the assassination of Kirk on the Utah Valley University campus last September. Kirk’s parents and his widow, Erika Kirk, will attend the hearing, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. It is the first time Kirk’s family will be in the courtroom with the man accused of killing him.
Here's the latest:
Erika Kirk has arrived at the Utah courthouse for the preliminary hearing of the man accused of killing her husband, Charlie Kirk.
Three men escorted her into the building several minutes before the hearing was expected to begin.
Charlie Kirk’s parents, Robert and Kathryn Kirk, arrived separately.
Armed officers with binoculars are on the roof of the courthouse where Tyler Robinson faces a key hearing in the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk.
More officers are on the ground outside the courthouse. A drone was also flying overhead. Robinson’s defense team arrived at Utah County court with a dolly to move boxes of documents.
The focus of the hearing is whether there’s enough evidence to send Robinson to trial and whether the death penalty will be an option if there’s a conviction.
Shelly Juber, who lives nearby in Orem, got one of the 14 courtroom seats set aside for the public.
“I’m a trial watcher, true-crime enthusiast. … My grandson’s girlfriend was there the day it happened,” she said, referring to Utah Valley University.
For Tyler Robinson to be found guilty at trial, prosecutors will have to prove without any reasonable doubt that he killed Kirk. But the criteria for this week’s preliminary hearing are less strict.
Mark Kouris, who was a prosecutor and state judge in Salt Lake City, says there’s a low threshold for prosecutors to show the case against Robinson should proceed to trial.
“Effectively, it’s 51% — there’s a 51% chance they did it,” Kouris, now an adjunct professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law, said in an interview. “This standard is extremely low, and the chances of them not getting through it are, quite frankly, almost nothing.”
Charlie Kirk’s family thanked supporters for their kindness and prayers ahead of Monday’s preliminary hearing.
“Every court proceeding serves as a painful reminder of his death,” Erika Kirk, his widow, said in a statement posted on X, “and the loss that has irrevocably impacted our lives and the lives of his children.”
She added that the public outpouring “has sustained us during the darkest days of our lives.”
The statement was posted on behalf of Kirk’s parents, Robert and Kathryn, his widow and his sister Mary.
“Out of respect for the judicial process, we will not be commenting further at this time,” the brief statement said.
Erika Kirk forgave defendant Tyler Robinson during her husband’s memorial service in September.
“My husband, Charlie, he wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life,” she said as she struggled to hold back tears.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did. It is what Charlie would do,” she added.
Her declaration was an outlier among prominent conservatives, including President Donald Trump, who said in September on Fox News that he hopes Robinson gets the death penalty.
Erika Kirk took the helm of Turning Point USA, the conservative youth movement that her husband co-founded, shortly after her husband’s death.
She is expected in court throughout the week with her husband’s parents, Robert and Kathryn Kirk, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
State District Judge Tony Graf said recently that prosecutors violated his restrictions on talking outside the courtroom when Deputy Utah County Attorney Christopher Ballard told a media outlet his office had ample evidence to convict Tyler Robinson of killing Charlie Kirk.
Robinson’s lawyers argued the comments were intended to influence potential jurors. As a punishment, they wanted the judge to block prosecutors from seeking the death penalty.
But Graf said that was too severe, and that Ballard's comments weren’t malicious.
The judge said any potential bias issues could be addressed by expanding the jury pool or more closely questioning potential jurors when the case goes to trial.
Starting with today’s hearing, the focus of the case shifts to whether there is enough evidence for a trial and whether the death penalty is warranted, said Paul Cassell, a University of Utah law professor and former federal judge.
Cassell said evidence made public to date in court filings suggests prosecutors have “an overwhelming case.”
“This seems like the proverbial slam dunk at this stage of the case, where the only issue is whether there is a sound basis for moving forward with a trial on the merits,” he said.
A death sentence is an option in Utah only when a crime has aggravating circumstances. Prosecutors will argue in Robinson’s case that Kirk’s shooting endangered others in attendance.
Authorities have said DNA consistent with Robinson’s was found on the trigger of the rifle used to kill Kirk, the fired cartridge casing, two unfired cartridges and a towel used to wrap the rifle.
Robinson’s parents had confronted him after authorities released a surveillance photo of the suspect and details about the rifle, authorities have said. His parents convinced him to meet with a family friend, a retired sheriff’s deputy who reportedly helped arrange for Robinson to turn himself in.
Prosecutors have said Robinson left a note for his roommate, who was also his romantic partner, that read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.” They also said he wrote to his roommate in a text message about Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Defense attorneys unsuccessfully sought to block prosecutors from using recorded statements from Robinson’s roommate during the hearing. The defense wanted the roommate to testify in person so Robinson could exercise his right to challenge the credibility of witnesses against him. Graf said the time for challenging witnesses would come later.
The proceeding will resemble a mini-trial, with prosecutors planning to offer DNA evidence linking Robinson to the suspected murder weapon, testimony from investigators, autopsy findings, witness statements and video of Kirk’s killing. They are not required to present all their evidence and can use secondhand information or hearsay.
After the hearing concludes, state District Judge Tony Graf must determine if the case should proceed.
Prosecutors need only demonstrate that there are reasonable grounds to believe Robinson killed Kirk. The standard is lower than for a trial, where prosecutors have to prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Charlie Kirk’s widow and parents are expected this week in a Utah court where prosecutors seeking the death penalty will argue that the man charged with killing the conservative activist should stand trial for murder.
The five-day preliminary hearing that starts today will be the first time members of Kirk’s family are in the Utah courtroom with defendant Tyler Robinson. The hearing will be livestreamed.
Robinson turned himself in after the shooting. Prosecutors allege that he also sent a text message confession to his partner and left a note saying he had an opportunity to kill one of the nation’s leading conservative voices, “and I’m going to take it.”
He has not entered a plea in the case, however.
Robinson, 23, is charged with aggravated murder in the Sept. 10 assassination of Kirk, who was addressing a crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University. His attorneys have not commented on his guilt or innocence.
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FILE - A well-wisher places flowers at a makeshift memorial set up for Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA headquarters, Sept. 11, 2025, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)
FILE - Charlie Kirk hands out hats before speaking at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, Sept. 10, 2025. (Tess Crowley/The Deseret News via AP, File)
