Exclusive billionaires' investment club leads Collibra's $50m Series C

Belgian data governance business Collibra has today announced the closure of its Series C round, almost tripling its venture capital funding.

Collibra was founded in 2008, but as a European company did not follow the typical Valley model of growth and was, according to CEO and co-founder Felix Van de Maele, already cash-flow positive/profitable before its Series B funding round led by Index Ventures.

Van de Maele told The Register that, at the time of its Series B, the company jumped at the opportunity to go into growth mode. Van de Maele added that the business "didn't expect to raise [this Series C round], but got a lot of inbound interest from investors" and decided to pursue the opportunity to "build a category defining company".

Leading the unexpected $50m round of funding — which has taken total venture investment in the company to over $75m — was the exclusive billionaires' investment advisory group, Iconiq Capital, which Collibra has provided with a board seat to be occupied by general partner Matt Jacobson.

Iconiq Capital, which counts Mark Zuckerberg, Lakshmi Mittal and Jack Dorsey among its muchos-moneyed members, describes itself as "a global multi-family office and merchant bank for a group of influential families".

Also joining the board, as an observer, is general partner at Battery, Dharmesh Thakker. Battery had participated in the round alongside return backers Dawn Capital, Index Ventures and Newion Investments.

Van de Maele told The Register that Collibra would be spending the $50m "accelerating" the business's investment in growth, which he added has seen it grow from "about 70 to 200 people in the last year" and triple its revenue in the same time to "between 10 and 100 million".

Collibra is seeing "a lot of use-cases for data governance", according to Van de Maele, "across a lot of verticals" and not just its bread-and-butter territory of compliance within the financial industries.

Growth will remain on the cards for now, the CEO said, stating that while there was "a plan to profitability based on this round, there always is".

"So that's what we're executing against," he continued, and while there may be more funding rounds in the future, "there's no plans" for such rounds at the moment.

Of Iconiq's involvement, Van de Maele said he was "really impressed as to what they've done" with other partners, and noted that the venture fund had "a huge amount of capital that they can put to work."

Jacobson's board seat was "not at all" something Collibra regretted. Van de Maele said he was "excited to have Matt Jacobson join us as a board member, as well as Dharmesh as an observer" due to his previous experience in funding Cloudera and MongoDB. ®