Due to the paradigm change that occurred during the unanticipated COVID-19 pandemic, data breaches have expanded by leaps and bounds, and individuals are becoming extra cautious to maintain a safe online health of companies.
A report by security firm SecureAge Technology revealed that 48% of businesses in the UK reported data breach during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a survey of 200 employers and 400 employees. During the same time period, 16% of employees experienced a personal cybersecurity issue. Meanwhile, another report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute research for 2021 found out that the average cost of a data breach among surveyed firms hit $4.24M per incident in 2021, which is considered the highest in 17 years.
Collibra picks $250M Series G
In order to ensure data protection and compliance, the Belgian-based data intelligence startup Collibra provides services to assist enterprises with a variety of concerns, including data privacy and security, compliance and risk mitigation, operational efficiency, and cost savings. Its products guide consumers in adhering to local data protection policies and help in securely storing data.
The company has now declared that it has secured $250M(£184.3M) in Series G funding at a post-money valuation of $5.25B(£3.87B). The round was led by Sequoia Capital Global Equities (SCGE) and Sofina and it also saw participation from Tiger Global Management and existing investors Battery Ventures, CapitalG, Dawn Capital, Durable Capital Partners LP, ICONIQ Capital and Index Ventures.
Collibra had raised $112.5M(£82.9M) in funding at a post-money valuation of $2.36B(£1.74M) in 2020.
The proceeds will be utilised to improve its Data Intelligence Cloud, a single data engagement solution. Collibra claims to leverage an edge-cloud architecture, open APIs, and graph metadata analytics technology to link to current data sources, business applications, data science, and business intelligence tools all in one place.
Collibra claims to be expanding existing collaborations in their ecosystem, which include AWS, Google Cloud, Snowflake, and Tableau, among others.
The Belgian firm plans to grow its global presence by hiring in key areas such as engineering, sales, customer success, and product. By 2023, it intends to double the global workforce.
Tech At Play
Collibra allows companies to build a common and trusted language around data scattered across fragmented tools and systems, helping them to modernise and integrate their heterogeneous data sources faster. As a result, consumers can search, analyse, and use data in a simple and secure manner, enabling them to perform more reliable business choices and explore new business probabilities.
“We’re seeing a lot of interest in our platform, and the interest from investors supports our approach to helping our customers get more value out of their data,” said Felix Van de Maele, Collibra’s founder and CEO. “We are the only firm in the market that offers customers a single, fully integrated cloud-native platform to support them stimulate their digital transformation.”
One of the first Belgian tech unicorns
Founded in Belgium in 2008, Collibra created a number of technologies that make up what it calls its data intelligence cloud, which allows both technical and business users to collaborate and merge data silos to uncover hidden meaning in their vast amounts of data. Data catalogue, for discovering and classifying data; data privacy, for centralised tooling to meet legal standards; data lineage, for mapping links between applications and systems; data quality, and data governance are all examples of this.
Now New York-based Collibra claims to work with approximately 500 worldwide companies, including seven of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, 70 percent of the largest banks in the United States, and several of the world’s leading retailers.
