Collibra acquires trail to automate AI governance from policy to production

NEW YORK and BRUSSELS, October 5, 2026 - Collibra, the enterprise AI control plane, today announced the acquisition of trail ML, a Munich-based AI governance company founded in 2023 by Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger and Sven Hölzel.

As organizations deploy more AI systems and autonomous agents, governance has to keep pace. Understanding which policies, regulations, and standards apply is no longer enough. Organizations must continuously determine which controls apply, verify their effectiveness, and enforce them as AI interacts with enterprise data, systems, and tools.

Together, Collibra and trail ML will help organizations automate this work and turn AI governance policies into continuous action. Collibra provides the enterprise context and control organizations need to govern AI across data, models, applications and agents. trail ML adds agent-powered automation that can analyze evidence, determine applicable requirements, assess controls, identify gaps and automate governance workflows.

“AI governance cannot become another manual process that slows organizations down as AI scales,” said Felix Van de Maele, Co-founder and CEO of Collibra. “trail ML brings powerful automation to Collibra’s context and control. For Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) teams, that means less manual work assessing controls and maintaining evidence, and a better way to keep pace with rapidly changing AI environments. Together, we can make governance continuous and operational.”

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Automating governance from assessment to enforcement

trail ML agents can analyze the context surrounding an AI system, determine applicable frameworks and controls, and assess whether controls are in place and effective. This helps organizations operationalize requirements across regulations and standards such as the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

As supporting evidence changes, assessments can be triggered again, helping organizations move from manual, point-in-time assessments toward a continuously updated view of their governance and compliance posture.

AI incidents increasingly start with agents taking actions, not models giving answers. trail ML's runtime capabilities close that gap, enforcing Collibra policies directly where agents run and blocking actions that violate them before they happen.

“We founded trail ML because we believe AI governance has to be automated and operational,” said Anna Spitznagel, Co-founder and CEO of trail ML. “By combining trail ML’s automation and runtime capabilities with Collibra’s enterprise context, governance and reach, we can help organizations move faster with AI, safely and at scale.”

Collibra and trail ML are united by the same mission: helping organizations put AI to work faster, with the confidence to scale it safely. The acquisition advances Collibra's vision as the enterprise AI control plane that makes this possible.

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About Collibra

Collibra is the enterprise AI control plane. Built over eighteen years of ontology engineering, it governs context and control across any data, any model and any agent for AI leaders who need certainty at the speed of AI. A 5x Forrester Wave Leader and 2x Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader, Collibra serves more than 700 customers, including 78 of the Fortune 500, and governs more than 2 billion assets. To learn more, visit collibra.com and follow us on LinkedIn, X, Facebook and Instagram.

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