Straight out of Saratoga, California (not Menlo Park, get your geography right), Collate just locked in a $10M Series A. Led by Venrock, yes, the same house that backed Apple and Intel when the rest of the world was still figuring out floppy disks, this round isn’t about playing catch-up. It’s about building the metadata OS that the AI age actually needs.
The co-founders? Not your typical hoodie-and-hustle duo. Suresh Srinivas (CEO) has 26 years of firepower behind him, ex-Chief Architect of Uber’s Data Platform and co-founder of Hortonworks, where Hadoop didn’t just get popular, it got enterprise. Then there’s Sriharsha Chintalapani (CTO), ex-Data Architect at Uber, PMC member on Apache Kafka and Storm, and the kind of engineer who doesn’t just build systems, he redefines what they’re for.
Together, they’ve turned Collate’s open-source baby, OpenMetadata, into a global movement: 1,500+ enterprise deployments, 4,500+ GitHub stars, 250+ contributors, and nearly 10,000 community members on Slack who don’t just talk, they ship.
And the product? It’s like they built an AI agent, fed it a steady diet of bad metadata problems, and said, “Fix this mess.” The result: intelligent lineage tracking, natural language SQL generation, automated quality testing, and a Unified Metadata Graph that makes data governance actually make sense.
Let’s not gloss over the rest of the bench, either. Unusual Ventures and Karman Ventures came to play, joining Venrock in this round. And when Ganesh Srinivasan, former Chief Product Officer at Confluent, joins your board, you’re not just scaling; you’re sending a message: metadata’s last mile just got a first-class upgrade.
The business takeaway? Collate didn’t chase hype. They built something useful. By leading with open-source, letting the product speak for itself, and staying deadly focused on pain points that real data teams feel every day, they earned the right to scale. Now, they’re converting that trust into enterprise momentum, with ARR up 350% YoY and names like Mango and fundcraft seeing the results in real-time.
This isn’t a pivot. It’s a plotted course. Metadata doesn’t just need to be managed, it needs to be understood. Collate’s betting that the future of AI starts with data you can trust. And judging by the community they’ve built and the checkbooks backing them, they might just be right.
So yeah, $10M in the bank. But the real story? Collate’s not raising metadata. They’re elevating how the entire data game gets played.
