Collate Named to the DBTA 100: Companies That Matter Most in Data
Each year, Database Trends and Applications (DBTA) compiles the DBTA 100, which is a list of companies driving meaningful progress in data and analytics. Collate is honored to be named to the 2026 list.
"The big data and analytics space continue to be shaken up by the increasing pressure to integrate AI into the business. However, diving headfirst without guardrails can be a high-stakes introduction to artificial intelligence. It all comes down to trust: trust in data, trust in technology solutions, and trust in each other. To help bring new resources and innovation to light, each year, Database Trends and Applications magazine showcases the DBTA 100, a list of forward-thinking companies seeking to expand what's possible with data for their customers."
— Tom Hogan, Group Publisher, Database Trends and Applications
That framing of trust is the problem Collate was built to solve. A trusted, open context layer for people, AI agents, and assistants.
The crisis isn't the model. It's the meaning.
In a piece written for DBTA's "View from the Top" series, Collate CEO Suresh Srinivas named the real bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption:
"There's an underlying crisis undermining enterprise AI adoption — but it has nothing to do with AI models and everything to do with meaning. AI agents have no inherent understanding of what your data means. 'Revenue,' 'active customer,' 'regional sales' — these terms mean something specific inside your company, and something different at other companies. Without that context baked in, agents guess. And they guess wrong in ways that are hard to catch until the damage is done."
The gap isn't data volume or compute power. It's shared meaning thought a context layer that tells agents not just where data lives, but what it actually refers to. That gap is what makes enterprise AI so brittle in practice.
Collate addresses this by modeling business concepts, relationships, metadata, and policies in a unified semantic graph, so agents and people work from the same definitions. Built on OpenMetadata — the open-source AI context layer deployed by more than 3,000 organizations — Collate gives agents the context they need to act accurately without constant human supervision. On that foundation, Collate deploys AI agents that deliver chat-based analytics and handle data quality, governance, classification, and observability at scale.
The AI model isn't the bottleneck. It's the meaning layer, which includes context that goes even further with semantics and memory
Read Suresh's full "View from the Top" on DBTA
Request a demo to see how Collate helps your AI agents work from accurate, governed context.