Collibra Buys OwlDQ

February 8, 2021

OwlDQ uses machine learning to detect anomalies in data, to generate data quality rules automatically and to reconcile replication errors. The company helps leading organizations like Constellation and VillageCare make their data cleaner every day. The integration of OwlDQ into the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud introduces a new offering, Collibra Data Quality, which will allow organizations to centralize and automate data quality workflows to comply with global regulations and streamline their data and analytics processes across the enterprise.

"Data quality is integral to Data Intelligence, and poor data quality is a key reason why organizations don't trust their data," said Jim Cushman, chief product officer for Collibra. "Together, Collibra and OwlDQ will provide organizations with a single, cloud-based system of engagement to unify data governance, data privacy, data catalog, data lineage and now continuous data quality so teams can more easily and confidently get to trusted business insights and become data informed."

Many companies lack the enterprise data quality foundation necessary to respond to regulatory and business analytics demands in a scalable way. Without one, organizations are often trapped in manual rule writing and management, limited data connectivity, and a siloed view of data quality. This can result in massive productivity loss and costly fines due to regulatory risk and non-compliance, along with significant potential revenue loss.

"We've developed some of the most advanced machine learning to address comprehensive data quality challenges, such as profiling, rules, data reconciliation and discovering hidden data relationships. With OwlDQ's predictive data quality, companies can reduce complex and error-prone manual rule writing, streamline their data and analytics processes and expedite trusted business outcomes," said Kirk Haslbeck, founder and CEO of OwlDQ, who will serve as vice president of engineering at Collibra. "We are so excited to bring OwlDQ together with the Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud to provide a unified, scalable solution across diverse databases, files and streams with continuous and comprehensive self-service data quality through ML-powered, auto-discovered and adaptive data quality rules."

The acquisition is the latest milestone for Collibra, which reached a $2.3 billion valuation with its Series F funding in April 2020. The company also added more than 100 new customers in the past year, and today works with nearly 500 global companies, including seven of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies, 70% of the 10 largest U.S. banks and several of the world's largest retailers. Recently, Collibra was named a Leader in both the Forrester Wave for Machine Learning Data Catalogs (Q4 2020) and the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management.

"The addition of OwlDQ to the Collibra portfolio makes continuous data quality a reality, and bolsters the company's leadership in data intelligence," said Stewart Bond, research director for data integration and data intelligence software at IDC. "This acquisition further reinforces how critical data quality is in data intelligence, and will provide Collibra customers with a single system of engagement for trusted, contextual data that is necessary to make data-driven business decisions."

"OwlDQ is a game changer in data quality," said Ku'uipo Curry, director of IT data management at VillageCare. "When we found inconsistencies in our data we turned to OwlDQ to help us fix these complex issues. Owl helped us to safeguard and protect from these mishaps in the future. In addition, we were able to pull the results into a Tableau dashboard for our users to incorporate data cleaning into their workflows."