How Collate’s Series A Will Transform Agentic Data Intelligence
I’m excited to announce our $10M Series A financing round, a milestone that accelerates Collate’s mission to transform how data teams at global enterprises and cloud-native startups organize, understand, and govern their data in the era of AI. Led by Venrock, with participation from Unusual Ventures, and Karman Ventures, the funding validates our vision, product, and team and positions us for rapid growth.
AI is changing the world, and data is what makes it all possible. Every company wants to harness data and AI, but many struggle with a fundamental challenge: their data isn't ready. It’s siloed, disorganized, unreliable, and poorly managed.
This is where Collate and the open source OpenMetadata project come in, bringing the power of AI to getting that data ready with agentic data discovery, observability, and governance designed for modern data intelligence. Our team's deep experience in successful open source data projects is already helping Collate customers see the benefits of this virtuous cycle where better data enables better AI, and AI enables better data.
Pioneering Modern Data Infrastructure and Organizations
Collate is built on the open source OpenMetadata project and led by proven data infrastructure veterans with decades of experience. As Co-Founder and CEO of Collate, I bring deep expertise as a creator of Hadoop and OpenMetadata, Co-Founder of Hortonworks, and former Chief Architect for Data at Uber, where I helped transform the company's data culture. My Co-Founder and CTO Sriharsha Chintalapani was an Architect at both Uber and Hortonworks, led engineering teams at Mozilla and Yahoo!, and served as a committer on the project management committee for Apache Kafka, Storm, and Atlas.
This funding accelerates our growth serving enterprise-scale and cloud-native customers while enabling our vision of using AI to transform data intelligence and data-team culture. Equally important, it lets us invest even more deeply in the open source OpenMetadata community that forms the foundation of our platform.
The timing couldn't be better. Organizations of all sizes are pursuing mission-critical data and AI initiatives, while many are still struggling with getting the basics right. The complexity and scale of data continues to explode, while more and more parts of the business rely on data for their work. Today, one-third of employees are data practitioners — from engineers to business users, analysts to data scientists, governance to data leaders — all grappling with fragmented infrastructure, inadequate tooling, manual processes, and unreliable data.
Our Vision: Where AI Improves Data and Data Powers AI
At Collate, we're tackling these challenges by creating what I call a virtuous cycle: we use AI to improve data intelligence and management, which results in higher-quality data for AI.
This creates value in both directions. First, we help organizations prepare their data for AI initiatives — building high-quality data assets that teams can easily access and trust across the business — from tables and dashboards to ML models and beyond. And we’re helping them shift left by democratizing data access through self-service capabilities that empower everyone from data engineers to business analysts.
Second, we use AI to improve the data itself. Our agentic platform ingests, documents, classifies, and quality tests data, with more automated AI-powered workflows in development. What makes our agentic platform unique is its deep contextual understanding of your data and its relationships. This comes from two key architectural decisions: our open foundation and our Unified Knowledge Graph.
A Platform Architected for the Needs of Both Humans and AI
Open architecture is core to our platform. We're not just open source — we built the Collate platform to be vendor neutral and extensible wherever possible, so it’s connector-first, schema-first, and API-first. This lets us ingest metadata from more sources than other platforms: APIs, dashboards, search systems, streaming platforms, pipelines, storage, ML models, databases, data lakes, warehouses, and even other data catalogs. This comprehensive approach gives organizations visibility into their complete data estate — valuable for both human teams and AI agents.
Next, our Unified Knowledge Graph provides meaning by organizing metadata and mapping relationships between data assets. This creates rich context and understanding missed by traditional tools, including context from social and utilization signals. This open approach is necessary in order to map the relationships across proprietary tools and vendor data ecosystems. Only then can organizations see the full picture and understand what it all means.
For human teams, this approach means better data discovery and understanding. For our AI agents, this contextual awareness enables more intelligent workflows and better results for our customers.
Trusted by Enterprises and Cloud Natives
Companies like Mango, Carrefour Brazil, Niche, fundcraft, Decisiv, as well as other Fortune 500 software, automotive, financial, manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation companies, rely on Collate and OpenMetadata to change how they work with data.
Take global fashion leader Mango. With more than 2,000 stores worldwide and a data team of 70+ engineers, scientists, and analysts, Mango was struggling with data silos and quality issues that impacted everything from pricing optimization to AI-powered product design. After implementing Collate, Mango has achieved remarkable results: up to 20% increased productivity across its data teams, unified access for 800+ data users across departments, and 3x faster data-integration. Most importantly, higher data quality has improved the company’s ML models for pricing and discounting, an area where even a 1% accuracy improvement can significantly impact revenue in the competitive fashion industry. As Jordi Orriols Torras, Mango's Head of Data Governance, puts it: 'Collate has proven to be the cornerstone of our data strategy, so that our data teams can easily find, understand, and trust the data they need to be successful."
The Road Ahead
This Series A funding is just one step in our journey to transform how organizations work with data in the AI era. We've committed our open foundation as a strategic enabler to delivering more innovation in our multi-agent, orchestrated platform for data discovery, observability, and governance. The vision of agentic data intelligence continues to expand with recent feature releases, including Collate AI AutoPilot, with its Documentation Agent, Tiering Agent, Quality Agent, and Metadata Ingestion Agent. We've also added enterprise-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, which natively integrates the MCP server into our platform, enabling truly novel ways to both read and write changes to data.
Our vision is a future where data teams spend less time on manual processes and more time driving business value, and we're excited to work with the data community to push forward what's possible.
Venrock partner and and former Chief Product Officer of Confluent Ganesh Srinivasan has a great write up on the same vision that they also see for data. As he notes: “What makes Collate unique is its ability to solve the last-mile data challenges for modern data teams. Collate Co-Founders Suresh Srinivas and Sriharsha Chintalapani have an incredible track record of identifying and building disruptive products that are ahead of the market, and we couldn't be more excited to lead this Series A round to support them in their AI-led innovation.”
Want to learn more? Read the press release, the OpenMetadata Series A blog post, or join our next OpenMetadata community meeting to see what's coming next.
Ready to get started? Try Collate with demo data in our product sandbox, or sign up for Collate Free Tier.