Felix Van de Maele

Felix Van de Maele is co-founder and chief executive of Collibra, a data governance software company founded in Brussels, Belgium, and now run largely from New York City. Its software helps large organizations find, understand and control their data and, increasingly, the AI models and agents that use it.

Semantic Web Research at STARLab

Before Collibra he was a researcher at the Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory, or STARLab, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he worked on ontology-based crawlers for the semantic web and on semantic data integration. He holds a master's degree in computer science and software engineering from that university and a master's in general management from Vlerick Business School. Weighing his next step, he told Nathan Latka in a 2017 interview, he saw four options: a PhD, banking, consulting or starting his own company. "And the last thing was the only thing that really sounded exciting to me."

Spinning Collibra Out of the University

Collibra began in 2008 as a spin-off of the university, started by four young STARLab researchers who split the equity equally; Stijn Christiaens, now its chief data citizen, was one of them. Its first software converted data automatically from one file format to another. "Since the internet has existed, companies have been exchanging gigantic amounts of information," Van de Maele told the Brussels news site Bruzz that year, in Dutch, explaining that databases often had to be converted by hand at great cost.

The company raised a small seed round and then grew to profitability before taking larger rounds. Looking back at starting so young, he said he would not change much, because "it's good to not know too much. Otherwise, you don't take any risk."

Finding a Market in Bank Compliance

Collibra found its first customers among financial institutions that needed to meet regulatory requirements, then spread to other industries as companies collected more data. The founders moved from Brussels to New York to be near its mostly American customers. By early 2017 Collibra had close to 200 enterprise customers paying $200,000 to $250,000 a year on average, and 210 employees in the United States, Belgium, Britain and Poland. He described the goal as "the Amazonification of data, where ultimately users just shop for data like they are on Amazon." In 2019 he was EY Technology Entrepreneur of the Year in New York.

Governing Data and AI

Collibra now sells unified governance for data and AI, and in January 2026 Gartner placed it as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for data and analytics governance platforms for the second year in a row. In a Harris Poll survey Collibra commissioned in 2026, 93% of U.S. technology decision makers said companies should be required to disclose their use of AI tools and agents. "The results send a clear message that the industry is expecting a level of accountability that matches the speed of the AI," Van de Maele said in the announcement.