Collibra, a data governance platform based in Brussels, is the latest enterprise to acquire a data company in order to expand its offerings in the age of AI.
On Thursday, Collibra announced its acquisition of Raito, a data access startup founded in 2021. Raito, also located in Brussels, helps companies manage which employees and customers have access to internal data.
Collibra declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Raito previously raised $4 million in venture funding from investors, including Dawn Capital, Crane Venture Partners, and Collibra itself.
Collibra founder and CEO Felix Van de Maele told TechCrunch that while managing data access is not a new problem for enterprises, it is becoming a bigger headache for data teams as more departments seek access for AI agents and workflow automation.
“We heard from our customers and large organizations that managing data access at scale has become a really big problem,” Van de Maele said. “That’s why the traditional approaches just don’t scale anymore. They’re too brittle. They’re manual workflows, [based on] static policies.”
Van de Maele added that Collibra already has a similar product, Collibra Protect, that touches on these access controls but is primarily focused on keeping data private. Raito’s tech will help Collibra bolster and automate that offering.
Raito isn’t the only company focused on data access. Legacy enterprises like SailPoint and SecureAuth are just a few of the companies also offering data access tools. Van de Maele said buying Raito was the right choice for the company, as opposed to partnering with a legacy player, because Raito is cloud-native and built for the current AI moment.
That Raito was founded by former Collibra employees didn’t hurt either.
“We also [were] looking for teams that want to continue to build, right? It’s not the end for this,” Van de Maele said. “It is just really the beginning of this journey.”
This is just the latest acquisition of a data company aimed at addressing a data governance void as companies look to shore up their stack to adapt to AI innovation. Last week, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Informatica for the same reason. Earlier in May, both Alation and ServiceNow made similar acquisitions.
Van de Maele added that advancements in AI have made people realize just how fragmented their data stacks have become, as many players had flooded the market over the last decade with single-point data solutions.
“That fragmentation of governance … has really become a big problem, and so that’s why we were excited to kind of acquire Raito and really make it part of Collibra, our unified governance platform for data and AI,” Van de Maele said.
Collibra was founded in 2008 as an early player in the data governance sector. The company has since raised nearly $600 million in venture capital from firms including Index Ventures, Sequoia, and Tiger Global, among others. The company works with enterprises that include Heineken, Credit Suisse, and SAP.