As more data moves to the cloud, it often still lives in multiple places on a business’ network, making it difficult for organizations to understand and access the right data they need and easier for data breaches to occur.
Collibra, which provides tools to find, understand, access and analyze data, announced today that it raised $250 million in Series G funding, at a post-money valuation of $5.25 billion. Its products help customers comply with local data protection policies and store data securely.
The new valuation is more than double what the Brussels-based company announced last year when it secured $112.5 million in a Series F investment that put its valuation at $2.3 billion. That followed a $100 million investment in 2019 at a valuation of just over $1 billion.
“The valuation is a strong reflection of our position in the market,” Felix Van de Maele, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. “If you look around, we have the highest valuation among our competitors and this is a reflection of growth. We are very excited to more than double our valuation in 18 months.”
The latest round of funding was co-led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Sofina, with participation from new investor Tiger Global Management and existing investors Battery Ventures, CapitalG, Dawn Capital, Durable Capital Partners LP, ICONIQ Capital and Index Ventures.
Collibra was spun out of Vrije Universiteit in Belgium in 2008 and today it works with more than 500 enterprises and other large organizations like AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake and Tableau. It has over 900 employees working remotely and in hubs, including Brussels, New York City, Atlanta and Poland.
The funding follows record growth by the company, including the acquisition of OwlDQ, a provider of predictive data quality software, in February, Van de Maele said.
“There is a ‘Renaissance’ around data and fueling artificial intelligence models,” he added. “These were manually done before, and now we use AI and machine learning to automate models. It is how we observe the data infrastructure and prepare for problems.”
When the company first started, the complexity of the data landscape included millions of data assets, and now that landscape is on the road to billions. To scale to this volume and manage the growth associated, Collibra went after the new funding.
Van de Maele said he “is excited” to have Sequoia and Tiger in the cap table this time around and that existing investors have come back. His goal with investors was to find those that would continue to partner with the company over the long-term.
The new capital will be deployed into expanding its presence across the United States, Europe, Middle East and Australia. Van de Maele expects to make significant hires in engineering, sales and product, essentially doubling Collibra’s workforce by 2023. It will also invest in R&D, customer success and go-to-market so that it can continue providing new features for its Data Intelligence Cloud offering.
Though the company has been around for over a decade, Van de Maele still considers the data intelligence space to be early, especially as larger enterprise companies come onboard.
“The complexity and chaos is at a different level, and what we hear is that they want one platform, not five different tools,” he added. “More organizations need that foundation, but just putting data from one place into a data lake is not going to solve the problem of getting value from it.”