Stitch named Braze ANZ Rising Star of the Year 2026. Auckland-based martech consultancy Stitch has been named ANZ Rising Star of the Year at the inaugural Braze ANZ Partner Awards. Co-founder and managing partner Adnan Khan and head of marketing and AI automation Vikas Varma accepted the award at Braze Partner Day Sydney on August 17. The event was held at the Hyatt Regency Sydney and attended by more than 100 leaders from across the Braze ANZ partner ecosystem. The award recognises the partner that has most rapidly grown its impact within the Braze Alloys Partner Network across Australia and New Zealand. Braze's judging panel highlighted Stitch's evolution from a new partner into one of the ANZ ecosystem's most impactful and trusted delivery partners, setting a benchmark for delivery excellence across the network. The best is still ahead. Founded in Auckland in 2019 by Adnan Khan and Simon Wedde, Stitch is a Braze solutions and delivery partner working across marketing technology, media, advertising and adtech. It delivers Braze implementations, migrations, CDP and data architecture, and managed customer engagement services for brands across New Zealand, Australia and beyond. Its expertise spans travel, tourism, SaaS, technology, automotive, real estate, ecommerce and education, underpinned by its Data Inspired Marketing methodology. In the past year Stitch has delivered Braze programmes for New Zealand companies including agentic travel technology platform Serko (NZX/ASX: SKO), and was recently appointed by Skyline Enterprises as their Braze onboarding partner. "Two years ago we were a new Braze partner that most of the ANZ ecosystem hadn't heard of, so Rising Star is an award we're proud to accept on behalf of our whole team in Auckland," says Khan. "This recognition belongs to our team and to our clients, who trusted us to take on their complex enterprise data and customer engagement needs. Stitch is an independent consultancy with big ambitions, and we think the best of what we can build with Braze is still ahead of us." A trusted partner. "This award is thoroughly well deserved," says Braze senior director, commercial partnerships, APJ Chris Johnston. "The way the Stitch team works with our teams on opportunities - the responsiveness, transparency and depth of information - is first-class. It is honestly the best I have seen in my time in this role, and we look forward to continuing to grow our partnership across New Zealand and Australia." "Stitch worked alongside the Serko team to build the backbone of our Braze programme, from beta through to commercial launch for our new agentic product, Serko.ai," says Serko director of growth marketing Kathryn Hoolihan. "They move fast, and when we hit constraints, they came back with options to keep us moving forward. As we push into an agentic, real-time model of customer engagement, Stitch is a key partner we trust to build alongside us, not just for us." Skyline Enterprises group customer experience manager Ella Spittle says: "Stitch stands out as an agile and responsive partner with a track record of supporting clients to maximise their Braze investment at speed. "They've quickly become an invaluable extension of our team, helping us to achieve value from Braze within just weeks while designing the right foundations for our longer-term customer engagement ambitions."

The marketing activation gap has a fix: Databricks and Stitch partner to turn data infrastructure into marketing performance. Databricks and Stitch are partnering to close the gap between what enterprise data can do and what marketing actually delivers. * Why enterprise data teams are building powerful Databricks infrastructure that marketing teams still can't use - and what that gap actually costs * How Stitch connects the data and marketing worlds, combining deep Databricks expertise with hands-on knowledge of how modern marketing organizations operate * What a strong marketing data foundation looks like in practice, with real examples from QSR, retail, and healthcare brands already running on Databricks today Most CMOs can feel this gap before they can name it. Campaigns that guess rather than react to real-time signals. Offers built on a segment someone configured last quarter, not what's happening now. AI initiatives that become limited by a lack of data accessibility. "We have Databricks" should mean something to the marketing team, not just the data team. That's exactly what this partnership is built to ensure. But the reality is that most brands aren't there yet. The architecture connecting enterprise data infrastructure to marketing performance was never designed for this moment... until now. The martech stack wasn't built for what's coming - and the window to fix it is closing. For the better part of two decades, the default answer to every marketing challenge was: add a tool. A CDP for unification. Middleware to move data around. A separate decisioning layer. A personalization engine bolted on the side. A campaign platform that talks, sometimes, to the warehouse. The result is a marketing stack that's expensive, fragile, and increasingly in the way. And AI is about to make it harder. Competitors building from scratch with AI at the center are designing their marketing operations differently - running campaigns, personalization, and QA through agents that work directly on clean, unified data. Brands still relying on disconnected tool stacks are going to fall behind. Not a little behind. The kind of behind that takes years to reverse. The brands winning right now aren't waiting for this to be fully figured out. They're making architectural decisions today that let them move faster as AI tools get better. The ones still exporting CSVs, waiting three days for data to land in a campaign platform, and routing every request through a central data team are already losing ground. This is the gap this partnership is designed to close, and why closing it now matters. The gap between data and marketing. Databricks has become the data platform of choice for some of the most sophisticated marketing organizations in the world. 60% of the Fortune 500 across retail, CPG, QSR, media, and healthcare are running customer data through it, building AI agents, running ML models, powering real-time segmentation. But a persistent problem has remained. Data engineering teams build powerful infrastructure in Databricks - clean, governed, scalable - and marketing teams are left on the outside of it, still pulling levers in tools that don't connect to what was just built. The two functions want the same outcomes. They just don't share a language for getting there. The platform is still doing its job, but the gap is that the people who built it and the people who need to use it have never had a shared language for working together. Stitch as the marketing implementation layer. The missing piece in most Databricks implementations isn't technical capability. It's marketing fluency - understanding what a VP of CRM is actually accountable for, how modern campaign platforms work, and what "putting data to work in campaigns" really means when retention revenue is on the line. Stitch was built specifically for that intersection. Founded by two operators with deep experience building and running enterprise marketing technology at scale, Stitch has spent years inside the marketing organizations that Databricks customers are trying to serve. They understand the metrics marketers are held to, the platforms they rely on, like Braze, and the specific ways marketing and data teams tend to talk past each other. That combination - technical depth in Databricks and genuine expertise in how modern marketing organizations operate - is rare. It's what makes Stitch a different kind of partner. Stitch was purpose-built for this intersection: deep enough in Databricks to earn the trust of a data engineering team, and experienced enough in how marketing organizations actually run to know what "great" looks like on the other side. What this partnership provides is specific: a team that understands what Databricks can do and what it takes to turn that into marketing performance, and has built the connective layer between the two. In practice, that expertise shows up across five areas: * Marketing data architecture built for campaigns, not just reporting. Stitch structures data in Databricks so it's ready to power real-time segmentation, personalization, and AI-driven decisioning from day one. A fast-growing convenience store brand is already using this to connect real-time transaction data directly to customer marketing. A national medical testing company used it to bridge its marketing and data engineering functions - and started seeing measurable campaign results within weeks. * Full-stack marketing applications built on Databricks. Stitch builds the operating systems that let distributed teams - franchisees, regional operators, wholesale partners - run campaigns without routing every request through a central team. Front-end, logic, and campaign execution on a single platform with a single set of rules. No stitching together four separate tools. No data leaving the environment. * Self-service analytics so marketing doesn't need a data ticket. One of the most consistent patterns across enterprise brands: data teams build impressive infrastructure that marketing teams can't touch. Stitch implements use-case-focused solutions with Genie that give non-technical marketing and analytics users the ability to query, explore, and act on data themselves - on their own timeline. * AI agents for marketing operations built natively on Databricks. From campaign orchestration to personalized recommendations to automated quality assurance, Stitch builds AI-powered marketing solutions directly on the Databricks platform stack - no bolt-on tools, no additional vendors. A global QSR is already rebuilding its campaign workflows on top of Databricks. * Migrations off legacy platforms that can't keep up. For brands still running on rigid legacy marketing platforms, Stitch has developed tooling to accelerate the move to a modern, modular stack with Databricks as the data foundation, built to flex as AI tools get better and needs change. The conversation worth having now. Databricks is the data platform that enterprise marketing organizations are already betting on. Stitch is the partner that understands both what Databricks can do for marketers and what marketing teams need to actually succeed. That's what this partnership provides: a team that speaks both languages and has built the operating system that connects them. If your organization is sitting on Databricks infrastructure that marketing hasn't fully put to work, or if you're rethinking what your marketing architecture should look like when AI is at the center of it, this is the right moment to have that conversation. Organizations ready to close the gap can connect with Stitch to explore what's possible. Get in touch