Felix Van de maele

Cofounder, Collibra

Search every verified Felix Van de maele interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In 2022, Felix Van de Maele, co-founder and CEO of Collibra, discussed the company’s focus on data governance and intelligence. He described governance as a policy-setting exercise centered on trust, involving business glossaries and workflows to ensure data is created, managed, and used reliably. Van de Maele stated that Collibra connects to various systems to capture metadata without moving data, comparing the approach to managing a library’s index cards. He expressed support for the data mesh concept, calling it “governance for architects” and arguing that decentralization makes governance more important)Skip. He noted that the company had over 600 enterprise customers, including Adobe, Heineken, and Bank of America, and highlighted momentum with cloud partners such as Google, Amazon, and Snowflake. Van de Maele said that the complexity of finding trusted data has increased as data becomes more mission-critical, and that economic pressures are pushing organizations to take data more seriously. He described Collibra’s acquisition related to data quality and observability as an opportunity to use AI/ML for automation and monitoring of real-time data pipelines. He also mentioned the introduction of a data marketplace and a product called Collibra Protect for access governance and data masking. Van de Maele stated that the company’s mission is to deliver trusted data for every user and use case, and that scaling data as a business function is a key priority.