Collate, the company behind the fast-growing open-source project OpenMetadata, has successfully raised $10 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Venrock with participation from Unusual Ventures and Karman Ventures. With this new funding, Collate aims to accelerate the development of its AI-native metadata platform, scale its enterprise operations, and deepen its engagement with the data engineering community.

AI Agents for Data Teams: Collate's Core Value Proposition

Collate’s mission is to help data teams regain control over sprawling, fragmented data assets. Using AI agents, the platform enables users to automate data discovery, quality checks, observability, lineage, governance, and collaboration - activities that traditionally require a combination of expensive tools and manual workflows.

At the heart of the product is a unified metadata knowledge graph that connects siloed data sources and delivers context to every data asset. With this foundation, Collate enables fast, precise insights across large data ecosystems - reducing friction between engineering and business teams.

A Surge of Enterprise Adoption and Community Momentum

The last 12 months have marked exponential growth for Collate. OpenMetadata, the open-source core behind its enterprise offering, has exploded to nearly 10,000 community members and contributed to over 3,000% usage growth. The project has become a key enabler for companies looking to modernize data governance and build AI-ready data infrastructure.

Collate already counts high-velocity companies like Woop, Decisiv, RATP Group, Millennium BCP, and fundcraft among its users. These organizations rely on Collate to replace outdated manual processes and gain visibility into the health, ownership, and usage of their data.

A Founder Team Built for the Infrastructure Layer

Collate was co-founded by CEO Suresh Srinivas and CTO Sriharsha Chintalapani, two engineers with deep roots in open-source infrastructure. Srinivas previously led the teams behind Apache Hadoop and Kafka at Hortonworks, while Chintalapani helped scale metadata platforms at Uber, including DataBook.

Their collective experience spans more than two decades of building systems that power some of the world’s most demanding data environments. This grounding has informed Collate’s architecture: open, scalable, and aligned with how engineers actually work.

A Strategic Move Toward AI-Native Workflows

More than just a metadata platform, Collate is evolving into an AI-native automation layer. Their agentic approach allows organizations to delegate critical data workflows to autonomous agents - saving engineering time while improving data quality and governance at scale.

In practice, these agents continuously monitor datasets, flag inconsistencies, recommend owners, document usage patterns, and even execute remediation workflows. This shift turns metadata from a passive repository into an active intelligence layer that improves the speed and reliability of decision-making across teams.

Founders looking to build high-leverage infrastructure startups can learn a critical lesson from Collate: the most powerful value often lies in the “invisible layers.”

Rather than chasing flashy user-facing dashboards, Collate focused on the bottlenecks no one else wanted to touch - governance, lineage, documentation, ownership, and observability. These are the details that make data useful or unusable.

By solving these challenges through automation and AI-native design, Collate created an invisible layer of intelligence that accelerates engineering teams and builds trust across departments. It’s not the most visible product - but it’s often the most essential one. For founders, this underscores a timeless truth: long-term defensibility often hides behind unsexy but mission-critical problems.

How the $10M Series A Will Be Used

The Series A capital will be deployed across three key initiatives:

1. Expanding OpenMetadata's Community & Ecosystem - Collate will continue to invest in its open-source backbone, growing the contributor base and supporting integrations with modern data stack tools.
   
2. Accelerating Product Development - With a focus on agentic AI workflows, Collate will double down on automation for data quality, ownership tracking, and compliance readiness.
   
3. Scaling Enterprise Go-To-Market Operations - The team will grow its sales and success teams to support a growing pipeline of Fortune 500 and mid-market clients looking for modern metadata solutions.
   

Ganesh Srinivasan, Industry Partner at Venrock and former CPO of Confluent, will join Collate’s board, bringing strategic insight from scaling infrastructure businesses in the enterprise market.

Riding the Wave of AI Infrastructure Demand

As businesses rush to implement AI across functions, the need for reliable, contextualized, and accessible data is reaching critical levels. Organizations are realizing that AI initiatives fail without robust metadata foundations. Collate’s timing aligns perfectly with this wave.

Its platform provides the trust, governance, and automation needed for AI agents to work effectively - becoming the connective tissue between raw data and meaningful, compliant outcomes.

The Bigger Picture: Redefining Metadata as a Competitive Advantage

Collate isn’t just solving data problems - it’s changing how companies think about metadata. No longer a back-office afterthought, metadata is becoming a front-line enabler of innovation, compliance, and speed. Collate’s funding marks a turning point where intelligent metadata systems move from “nice-to-have” to “must-have.”

As the data ecosystem grows increasingly complex, platforms like Collate that embed automation, intelligence, and developer empathy will become essential infrastructure for the modern enterprise.