Software Company Collibra, Microsoft’s Rival Doubles Its Valuation To $5.25 Billion

On Tuesday, Sofware company Collibra announced that it raised $250 million in new funding round at a new valuation of $5.25 billion. The round was led by Sequioia Capital and Sofina, and saw participation from Tiger Global, ICONIQ Capital, Index Ventures and Alphabet’s venture unit CapitalG.

Its new valuation is more than double what the company was valued last year. According to Collibra, the company which already has a workforce of 953 employees (as seen on LinkedIn), plans to increase its workforce with the funds. It plans to hire new talents and at least double its workforce.

Collibra assists companies with analyzing data distributed across various countries. The company was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in New York and Brussels. The company competes with big names Microsoft, Snowflake, Informatica, etc., in the data management space and cloud business.

Speaking on the funding and the company’s plan to employ more hands, Felix Van de Maele, the company Chief Executive Officer, said that “what we’ve seen over the last couple of years has been so much more data. It’s moved to the cloud, there’s a lot of innovation. Because of that, there’s more usage of data, whether it’s through AI, machine learning, this whole digital transformation. The result is that there’s a lot more complexity, a lot more fragmentation”.

According to the CEO, Collibra also helps businesses to meander the unending data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), etc.

Collibra’s latest funding and new valuation come at a time when investments are pouring into the cloud and data management sector. For example, software company Databricks raised $1.6 billion in August.

Although it is experiencing massive growth, Collibra’s CEO announced that there are no short term plans regarding an IPO. “There’s a massive market opportunity. We have a strong position, we’re getting to the right scale and we’re building the company as if we could become a public company”, he said.

He also mentioned that Collibra was not up for sale and if there was anything relating to an acquisition, it’ll be the company acquiring another. “We believe we can be a large, independent company. There’s a lot of really interesting technology, great teams, and we had a scale that we can do some of that M&A ourselves, which we plan to continue to do”, he said.