Belgium just got its first billion-dollar tech startup, thanks to Alphabet's investment fund. The CEO explains how it survived the global financial crisis and almost going bankrupt

Collibra

Felix Van de Maele, CEO and cofounder of Collibra

• Belgian data governance startup Collibra announced Tuesday that it had closed $100 million in funding in a Series E round led by Alphabet's investment fund CapitalG.
• The deal values Collibra at over $1 billion, making it Belgium's first-ever tech "unicorn."
• Collibra, which now competes with IBM and Informatica, started when a group of students doing research at a university realized that they could take a class project and use it to solve real-life problems.
• Collibra launched in 2008, and immediately had to deal with a financial crisis, a lack of venture capitalists in Belgium, and even almost going bankrupt. Here's how it made it through.

In 2012, Belgian data governance startup Collibra had been around for four years...and was about two months away from going bankrupt.

Collibra was competing for a government contract, and prospects looked grim, with IBM in the running. Data governance helps companies make sure that the data they're using complies with regulations and corporate policies, with companies like IBM and Informatica considered leaders in the space.

Ultimately, though, Collibra underbid IBM and the other candidates and won that fateful project.

"If we didn't win that customer, I'm sure we would've gone bankrupt," Felix Van de Maele, cofounder and CEO of Collibra told Business Insider.

Since then, things have taken a turn for the better. Collibra, which competes with the likes of IBM and Informatica, announced on Tuesday that it raised $100 million in Series E funding in a round led by Alphabet's growth equity investment fund CapitalG. This puts the company's valuation just north of a billion dollars, making it Belgium's first "unicorn" startup with a valuation over $1 billion.

Van de Maele and his co-founders came up with the idea for Collibra while they were doing research at the University of Brussels. They were doing a project on semantic technology, the field for helping computers "understand" and report on the meaning of data. But the team quickly realized that there was a larger opportunity at hand.

"When you do research, you don't really solve the problem," Van de Maele said. "You write about it and make prototypes, but you don't get it in the hands of the people who have the problem. We felt it was an important problem to solve, so we started a company to solve it ourselves. We felt it had to be done."

Breaking out from Belgium

Right out of school, they launched Collibra in 2008 - bad timing, it turned out, with the global financial crisis about to hit. But the downturn ended up working in Collibra's favor: In the wake of the crisis, Collibra found brisk business in helping banks deal with new regulatory requirements.

However, the Belgian tech scene lacks many of Silicon Valley's perks. Belgian schools don't really have a pipeline to tech companies the way American engineering programs do. And venture capital investors, plentiful in California, are few and far between in Belgium.

"Starting a venture-backed startup wasn't something people really did," Van de Maele said. "In Belgium at the time, there's really no startup culture. Raising money was really difficult, and hiring people was really difficult. That was a struggle right from the start."

Collibra had to look internationally both for funding and new hires, while relying primarily on its own revenue to fund operations. The company opened an engineering office in Poland and eventually expanded to the U.S.

"We moved international very quickly," Van de Maele said. "Belgium is a smaller country, so, you understand, you need to go international really quickly."

Collibra raised a small seed round to kickstart the company, and then raised an Series A round from Newion Investments, an investment firm in the Netherlands. Although Van de Maele was only 23 at the time, the fact that the company came out of university research helped with its credibility, he says.

What's more, the company had a hard time making investors understand what it did. But the market has shifted, and people started to realize the value of data and the value of managing that data, says Van De Maele.

"We do data governance, and people immediately have the impression that governance is all about control and bureaucracy," Van de Maele said. "It's much more than just control. It's about how do you use data to be successful?"

Into the future

Now with the funding, Collibra plans to continue investing in its product and focusing on data privacy and automation. Europe now has its sweeping GDPR rules, and Van de Maele expects to see more focus around data privacy in the U.S. as well.

Read more: What you need to know about GDPR, the new EU privacy rules that have Silicon Valley scrambling to keep up

"Today we're in a different time where data has become extremely important for any company," Van de Maele said. "So many people consume data, trust that data, and are allowed to actually use that data. That's what we're helping our customers with."