Collibra to Tap Google AI Talent, Add 200 Staff in ’19

New York-based data management platform vendor Collibra is working with artificial intelligence experts at Google to improve the capabilities of its software, following a recent $100 million Series E funding round led by CapitalG, the private equity arm of Google parent Alphabet.

Collibra CEO Felix Van de Maele says the vendor can leverage Google’s expertise as “the biggest data company in the world” to contribute to its ongoing development efforts.

As well as investing in engineering and people, Collibra plans to use the funding in part to continue building out its platform. “There are a lot of things we can extend the platform with to address the problems that our clients have, and we will build out more around automation, using AI… and that’s where the partnership with CapitalG can benefit us and help accelerate the development of the platform,” Van de Maele says. “They have introduced us to the right people at Google to help us leverage machine learning and AI.”

Collibra currently uses machine learning and AI to categorize catalogs of data, ensure data is assigned to the correct fields, and validate the correct data lineage. This can be used to create recommendation engines that can—based on someone’s existing data assets—recommend other datasets that might meet their criteria. “We have this already, but we believe we can do it even better,” Van de Maele adds.

The vendor will also use the funding to add a further 200 staff across its marketing, engineering, and professional services teams by the end of this year, bringing total headcount to roughly 650. This is in line with last year’s growth, when the company started the year with around 250 staff and grew to 450 by year-end.

Van de Maele says the funding was unsolicited, and resulted from direct approaches by companies that wanted to invest in Collibra. “We didn’t think we would raise money again so soon… but you never know what the economy is going to do, so it’s good that we have money in the bank,” he says. “It also allows us to be opportunistic around M&A, for example. We don’t have any plans for large acquisitions, but we might do smaller acquisitions aligned to our product and technology vision, where we might encounter a buy-versus-build decision. From that perspective, we are always looking at companies.”