Information governance platform Collibra raises $250M

Collibra, a knowledge governance and intelligence platform that helps companies unlock insights from disparate knowledge sources, has raised $250 million in a collection G spherical of funding at a $5.25 billion valuation.

Based out of Belgium in 2008, Collibra develops varied merchandise that represent a part of what Collibra calls its knowledge intelligence cloud, permitting each technical and enterprise customers to collaborate and mix knowledge silos to seek out hidden that means of their wealth of data. This contains knowledge catalog, which is for locating and classifying knowledge; knowledge privateness, which serves centralized tooling to handle regulatory necessities; knowledge lineage, which maps relationships between purposes and techniques; knowledge high quality, and knowledge governance.

“Collibra is a brand new strategy to the [data] complexity downside, providing a single system of information engagement that helps knowledge modernization, digital transformation, compliance and privateness,” Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele advised VentureBeat. “Collibra makes positive everybody in a corporation is working with the identical set of data — we provide the one platform that may unite a whole group by delivering correct knowledge for each use, for each consumer and throughout each supply.”

This holistic strategy is how Collibra has managed to main clients comparable to Twitter, AXA, and AstraZeneca. Whereas combining knowledge from totally different SaaS apps or databases can unlock worthwhile predictions and insights about buyer churn, for instance, it will possibly additionally trigger a knowledge privateness headache round personally identifiable info (PII) and assembly strict rules as set out by GDPR, CCPA, amongst different new legal guidelines rising on the scene. To assist, Collibra provides automated knowledge classification, in order that if a specific dataset contains PII pertaining to a European Union (EU) resident, then it’s going to mechanically apply GDPR insurance policies, and the identical for CCPA in California.

And by utilizing machine studying to mechanically classify delicate knowledge, this protects firms a substantial period of time and sources.

Above: Collibra: Delicate knowledge discovery

Managing knowledge complexity

It’s been a busy yr within the broader knowledge administration and integration area, with the likes of Talend going personal in a $2.4 billion transaction, whereas simply final month Informatica reemerged as a billion-dollar public firm six years after being taken personal. Elsewhere, firms together with Reltio, Fivetran, and Matillion have all raised sizable sums of money to offer firms the correct instruments to handle their ever-growing arsenal of information.

Whereas all these varied firms is likely to be tackling the issue from totally different views, and a few are complementary somewhat than aggressive, the objective is in the end the identical — to mix and make sense of huge banks of information. This business push is being pushed by a number of components, in response to Van de Maele, together with a “large explosion within the quantity and complexity” of information, amongst different tendencies.

“We’ve seen an acceleration of cloud migration, and organizations want to have the ability to confidently and securely transfer their knowledge to the cloud,” Van de Maele added. “One other massive want is round AI and ML — as firms look to faucet into automation, they should first be certain that the information they’re utilizing could be trusted.”

Before now, Collibra had raised round $347 million, together with its $112 million collection F tranche final yr. Its newest collection G spherical of funding was led by Sequoia Capital International Equities (SCGE) and Sofina, with participation from Alphabet’s CapitalG, Tiger International Administration, Battery Ventures, Daybreak Capital, Sturdy Capital Companions, Iconiq Capital, and Index Ventures.