Collibra acquires Trail ML to add AI governance automation

Collibra announced the acquisition of Trail ML on October 5, 2026.[1] Trail ML is a Munich-based AI governance company founded in 2023 by Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger and Sven Hölzel.[1] Collibra says the deal adds agent-powered automation, continuous assessment and runtime control to its platform, which it describes as providing context and control for governing AI across data, models, applications and agents.[1] The announcement did not disclose a purchase price.[2]

Collibra says Trail ML’s agents can analyze evidence, identify applicable requirements, assess controls, find gaps and automate governance workflows.[1] The company says these capabilities can help organizations apply requirements from the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.[1] Trail ML describes its platform as serving both enterprises scaling AI and teams using AI for governance, risk and compliance work.[3] Its listed agent tasks also include risk categorization, gap analyses, evidence collection and report generation.[3]

Collibra says changes to supporting evidence can trigger another assessment, keeping governance and compliance reviews more current than point-in-time assessments.[1] It also says Trail ML’s runtime capabilities enforce Collibra policies where agents run and can block violating actions before they happen.[1] Collibra says AI incidents increasingly begin when agents take actions, rather than when models provide answers.[1] The company says the combined approach could make governance continuous and operational, and reduce manual work for GRC teams assessing controls and maintaining evidence.[1]

Trail ML says its platform can run as EU-hosted SaaS, on-premises or in a customer’s cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud.[3] It lists integrations including Jira, GitHub, SharePoint, ServiceNow, OneTrust and Databricks.[3] Trail ML says its agents write to customer systems only after human approval through a mechanism it calls Copy-on-Write.[3] The company reports 4x faster deployment of AI solutions based on customer outcomes and 70% faster compliance execution.[3] Collibra says it serves more than 700 customers, including 78 of the Fortune 500, and governs more than 2 billion assets.[1]