Collibra Acquires Raito to Enhance Data Governance and Access Control in the AI Era

Collibra acquires data access startup Raito | TechCrunch

Collibra, a data governance platform based in Brussels, is the latest enterprise to acquire a data company in order to expand its offerings in the age of AI. On Thursday, Collibra announced its acquisition Raito, a data access startup founded in 2021. Raito, also located in Brussels, helps companies manage which employees and customers have access to internal data. Collibra declined to comment on the terms of the deal. Raito previously raised $4 million in venture funding from investors, including Dawn Capital, Crane Venture Partners, and Collibra itself. Collibra founder and CEO Felix Van de Maele told TechCrunch that while managing data access is not a new problem for enterprises, it is becoming a bigger headache for data teams as more departments seek access for AI agents and workflow automation. "We heard from our customers and large organizations that managing data access at scale has become a really big problem," Van de Maele said. "That's why the traditional approaches just don't scale anymore. They're too brittle. They're manual workflows, [based on] static policies." Van de Maele added that Collibra already has a similar product, Collibra Protect, that touches on these access controls but is primarily focused on keeping data private. Raito's tech will help Collibra bolster and automate that offering. Raito isn't the only company focused on data access. Legacy enterprises like SailPoint and SecureAuth are just a few of the companies also offering data access tools. Van de Maele said buying Raito was the right choice for the company, as opposed to partnering with a legacy player, because Raito is cloud-native and built for the current AI moment. That Raito was founded by former Collibra employees didn't hurt either. "We also [were] looking for teams that want to continue to build, right? It's not the end for this," Van de Maele said. "It is just really the beginning of this journey." This is just the latest acquisition of a data company aimed at addressing a data governance void as companies look to shore up their stack to adapt to AI innovation. Last week, Salesforce announced its intent to acquire Informatica for the same reason. Earlier in May, both Alation and ServiceNow made similar acquisitions. Van de Maele added that advancements in AI have made people realize just how fragmented their data stacks have become, as many players had flooded the market over the last decade with single-point data solutions. "That fragmentation of governance . . .has really become a big problem, and so that's why we were excited to kind of acquire Raito and really make it part of Collibra, our unified governance platform for data and AI," Van de Maele said. Collibra was founded in 2008 as an early player to the data governance sector. The company has since raised nearly $600 million in venture capital from firms including Index Ventures, Sequoia and Tiger Global, among others. The company works with enterprises that include Heineken, Credit Suisse, and SAP.

Collibra acquires Raito to enhance its data security capabilities - SiliconANGLE

Collibra acquires Raito to enhance its data security capabilities Data management provider Collibra Inc. has acquired Raito BV, a startup that helps enterprises manage employee access to their business information. The companies announced the deal today without disclosing the financial terms. Raito, which was founded four years ago by former Collibra employees, has raised €4 million in funding. Collibra is backed by about $595 million from Index Ventures and other investors. The typical enterprise's data is scattered across a large number of systems. Collibra sells a cloud platform that can make records from different systems available through a centralized data catalog, which simplifies access. It also provides tools for other tasks. Collibra tracks how records change over time, identifies data quality issues and spots duplicate items. Another set of features in the company's platform helps enterprises manage employee access to their files. Using Collibra, an organization can implement policies that limit who can access what record and how. The acquisition of Raito will enhance this subset of the platform's feature set. Raito offers a data access management platform of the same name. It allows administrators to configure policies that regulate how workers interact with business data. Such policies can, for example, specify that users may access transaction logs in a financial database but not edit them or add new ones. For particularly sensitive systems, Raito can grant temporary access permissions. If a worker wishes to remove an erroneous record from an artificial intelligence training dataset, Raito could make the dataset editable for only a few minutes. The software can also prevent AI models from including sensitive information in prompt responses. Raito doubles as an observability tool. According to the company, its platform monitors how workers access business data and identifies access permissions that aren't actively used. Administrators can remove those permissions to reduce the risk of breaches. The fewer access permissions are assigned to an employee account, the less data is compromised in the event that the account is hacked. Collibra plans to integrate Raito's technology into its data management platform. "Organizations will be able to define access once -- on the semantic graph -- and have it enforced dynamically across platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, Google, AWS, Azure and more," Collibra co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Felix Van de Maele wrote in a blog post. "This eliminates duplication, inconsistencies and inefficiencies across the data landscape."