Brussels-based data intelligence and data governance company, Collibra, raised $250 million in a Series G round of funding. The funding round was led by Sequoia Capital and Belgian holding company, Sofina. A new investor, Tiger Global Management also participated, along with existing ones, such as Battery Venture, Capital G, Dawn Capital, Index Ventures, and others. 

With this new funding, Collibra is looking to expand its product offerings in the data governance and intelligence space.

Data intelligence is top of mind for Collibra

Collibra began its journey in 2008 as a data governance company. As Collibra’s co-founder and CEO Felix Van De Maele writes, the company soon broadened its offerings into the data intelligence area. 

Collibra’s product offering, Data Intelligence Cloud, is a cloud-based data management platform that helps enterprises derive insights from their data and make data visible to relevant departments within the organization. Automation is used to make data processing faster to help companies obtain a competitive advantage. Their unique selling point (USP) comes from what they refer to as a metadata graph, which forms the basis of data intelligence. A metadata graph is a type of knowledge graph that connects data assets to give visibility of the processes in the data landscape.

Collibra plans to invest the new capital in the data intelligence cloud platform to focus on governance, observability, data quality, and data security. The company plans to hone their product offerings through this expansion.

A G2 perspective: what does Collibra’s growth signify?

The complexity of data is increasing; the window between obtaining raw data to acting on the insights has compressed measurably. But the processed data mustn’t compromise quality because high-quality data results in better decisions. G2 expects to see a rise in products that offer data lifecycle automation in an effort to maintain data quality.

Collibra provides transparency in the data landscape, along with vital functionalities such as data cataloging, data quality, compliance, security, and governance integrated into one platform. The platform being cloud native offers an additional advantage, helping in the application development process and more adaptive application architecture. Since several software companies are adopting cloud to scale, investors see it as an opportunity to grow. 

The recent investment in Collibra ticks all the right boxes that investors think about before investing in a company—does the company have domain expertise, how big is the market for the product, and why is the company expanding now? Collibra has a large customer base worldwide, proving their prowess in the data intelligence area. Investors now have a solid answer to these questions through the way Collibra has grown.

Collibra also shows a promising future through its "march to a billion journey" initiative—allowing enterprises to understand their data. Huge volumes of data are generated regularly with companies still trying to figure out ways to derive value from it—companies like Collibra are saviors for such organizations. 

G2 data highlights that the traffic in Q3 2021 has increased by almost 42% from Q3 last year for G2’s Data Management Platform product suite category. 

Collibra paves the way toward achieving data quality

Most businesses are now looking for bringing about a change in the way data quality is achieved. During the pandemic, there was a sudden rise in online activity, increasing data influx, and thus its complexity. This sudden increase in data demands coerced organizations to turn toward solutions such as data management platforms and data intelligence to smartly manage data.

Collibra’s expansion of the data ecosystem leads us to expect growth in the use of business intelligence and management. This could further help businesses discover data easily and make data-driven decisions.