KNIME, a global leader in data analytics and data science software, has announced a significant leadership transition as it enters a new phase of growth. Founder and long-time CEO Michael Berthold is stepping down from day-to-day operations, with seasoned SaaS executive Trevor Kaufman appointed as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer.
This milestone marks an important evolution for KNIME as it continues to scale its platform, expand its global footprint, and support the future of data-driven decision-making in an increasingly AI-powered world.
From Vision to Market-Leading Data Science Platform
Since founding KNIME, Michael Berthold has been instrumental in shaping the company’s mission to democratize data science. Under his leadership, KNIME evolved from an idea into a trusted analytics platform used by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. Along the way, the company cultivated a strong global community, deep customer loyalty, and a people-first culture grounded in technical excellence.
Reflecting on his journey, Berthold highlighted the collective achievement of the KNIME team, emphasizing the strength of the product, the community, and the organization’s culture. While he is stepping away from operational leadership, Berthold will remain a shareholder and continue supporting KNIME as a trusted advisor, ensuring continuity during the transition.
Trevor Kaufman Brings Proven SaaS Scaling Expertise
Trevor Kaufman joins KNIME with decades of experience leading and scaling high-growth SaaS businesses. Most recently, he served as CEO of Piano, a New York–based analytics and optimization platform for media and publishing organizations. During his tenure, Kaufman grew Piano into a global company with 570 employees across fourteen countries, serving prominent clients such as The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, Rabobank, and ANA.
Prior to Piano, Kaufman was CEO of Possible Worldwide, a global digital network within WPP that he helped build to a 1,300-person organization. Possible was formed through the merger of several WPP agencies, including Schematic, a digital agency Kaufman founded in 1999 and later sold to WPP. His background spans digital transformation, analytics, and enterprise SaaS—expertise that aligns closely with KNIME’s next stage of growth.
Scaling Data Analytics in the Era of Agentic AI
KNIME’s leadership transition comes at a pivotal moment for the data analytics and AI software market. As organizations increasingly adopt advanced analytics, automation, and agentic AI, demand continues to grow for platforms that enable transparent, scalable, and collaborative data science.
Michael Berthold noted that KNIME has spent recent years completely revamping its software, laying a strong foundation for the future of data work. With a modernized platform and expanding market opportunity, the company is positioned to help organizations operationalize AI and analytics responsibly and effectively.
Kaufman has expressed strong alignment with KNIME’s culture and long-term vision, emphasizing his intention to preserve the company’s values while scaling operations to meet rising global demand. His appointment signals continuity in mission alongside acceleration in execution.
What This Leadership Change Means for Customers and Partners
For KNIME customers, partners, and users, the transition reinforces stability and long-term commitment. The company’s core mission, product roadmap, and community-driven approach remain unchanged, while the new leadership brings additional operational and global scaling expertise.
As enterprises seek robust data analytics platforms that support AI-driven insights without sacrificing transparency or control, KNIME’s position in the market continues to strengthen.
About KNIME
KNIME helps everybody make sense of data.
Its free and open-source KNIME Analytics Platform enables anyone–whether they come from a business, technical or data background–to intuitively work with data, every day. Beginners can learn data science through its low-code, visual interface, while more seasoned data experts can also take advantage of advanced analytic techniques, integration with scripting languages, ML libraries, and other tools of choice. The intuitive, yet powerful software thus serves as a common ground for all skill levels and disciplines, empowering knowledge-sharing to drive innovation in the practical applications of data science.
KNIME Business Hub is the commercial complement to KNIME Analytics Platform and enables users to collaborate on data science and share insights across the organization. KNIME Business Hub includes a secure environment in which a team, a department or an entire organization can share and re-use workflows and build up a repository of proven solutions and best practices for data science. Organizations can use KNIME Business Hub to centrally manage and deploy their analytical solutions at scale as REST APIs, dynamic reports, or self-service data apps, making data-driven decisioning accessible to all.
Together, the products support the complete data science lifecycle, allowing teams at all levels of analytics readiness to support the operationalization of data and to build a scalable data science practice.
KNIME users of all experience levels are further supported in their data science upskilling journey, thanks to the resources, pre-built workflows and extensions built by KNIME and the wider KNIME open source community of 300,000+ contributors. KNIME’s open approach ensures users can continuously work with all the bleeding edge techniques and data sources in the same intuitive environment, today and in years to come.
