Collibra

Founded in 2008 in Brussels by Felix Van de Maele and Stijn Christiaens as a spin-off from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Collibra sells data governance: a catalog of what data exists, where it came from, who owns it and which rules apply — the dull but necessary layer that GDPR and auditors demand. Once a company has hundreds of tables scattered across Snowflake and Databricks, the question "are we even allowed to use this column?" suddenly gets expensive to answer. It became one of Europe's data-tech unicorns and shifted its centre of gravity to New York.