Governance layer that turns enterprise data into certified context for AI systems and agents

Collibra was founded in Brussels in 2008 by Felix Van de Maele, Stijn Christiaens, and Pieter De Leenheer, who had worked together as researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The company is now headquartered in New York and has raised roughly $596M from investors including ICONIQ Growth, Index Ventures, and Sofina. Its original market was data governance for regulated industries, and that installed base, which the company says includes 78 of the Fortune 500 across finance, healthcare, energy, retail, and government, is the foundation for its current positioning around AI.

The platform sits above the storage and compute layer rather than inside it, cataloging assets across warehouses, lakes, and applications and recording lineage, quality signals, ownership, and the policy constraints that apply to each. Ontologies let an organization express its own concepts and the relationships between them, so meaning travels with the data rather than living in an analyst's head. Recent work extends this to unstructured sources such as email, PDFs, and SharePoint content, supported by the acquisition of Deasy Labs, and to the governance of AI systems themselves: the AI Command Center inventories models and agents, monitors their use, and applies controls across their lifecycle so AI decisions can be traced back to governed inputs.