Collibra snags $58M Series D led by Iconiq and Battery Ventures to simplify data governance

Collibra, a company that wants to help firms understand data governance, announced a $58 million Series D funding round today led by Iconiq Capital and Battery Ventures.

All of the investors involved in this round were coming back for another dip in the well. In addition to Iconiq and Battery Ventures, early Collibra investors Dawn Capital, Index Ventures and Newion Investments also participated. This round follows a $50 million Series C round almost exactly a year ago and brings the total raised to date to over $133 million, according to the company.

Collibra CEO and co-founder Felix Van de Maele would not discuss the valuation of today’s deal, only saying, “We don’t comment on our valuation, but it’s a big valuation increase versus the last round,” he said.

Iconiq is interesting because as TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden pointed out in the Series C story, it’s not just an investment company. It also acts as family office for the likes of the Zuckerbergs, Sheryl Sandberg, Reid Hofmann and Jack Dorsey.

As for what Collibra does, as companies gather ever more data, a problem arises. How do you understand what data you have, who has valid access to it and move it through a workflow to your data analysis tools?

That’s precisely what Collibra takes care of for large organizations like EMC, Holland America and Verizon (which owns this publication). “Most large organizations are in data chaos,” says Van de Maele. “We help them understand what data they have, where they store it and [understand] whether they are allowed to use it,” he said.

When the new European GDPR data privacy laws go into effect this spring, it will be more important than ever that companies who are using EU citizen data understand what data they have and who is allowed to access it. Collibra’s tools help companies comply with these kinds of government data privacy rules.

The company tends to compete with companies using Excel to try and track this information in an ad hoc manner inside spreadsheets, Van der Maele said. He says that they often see traditional vendors as well, like IBM, Informatica and other big data management tool suites, although he sees his company approach to understanding the data as far different from the data management tools from the big players.

Armed with an additional $58 million, the company plans to expand aggressively, according to Van de Maele. As you would expect, that would include sales and marketing and product engineering. The former is housed in the US and the latter in Europe. Collibra originally launched in Belgium in 2008.