Collibra Buys Trail ML, Adding Agent-Powered AI Governance Automation

Collibra announced the acquisition of trail ML on October 5, 2026, a deal the company said brings agent-powered automation, continuous assessment and runtime control to Collibra. trail ML is a Munich-based AI governance company founded in 2023 by Anna Spitznagel, Nikolaus Pinger and Sven Hölzel.

Collibra, which describes itself as the enterprise AI control plane, said the combination is intended to help enterprises automate governance and enforce AI policies, regulations and standards across the AI lifecycle. The company framed the acquisition around the growing deployment of AI systems and autonomous agents: it is no longer sufficient, Collibra said, to know which policies, regulations and standards apply. Organizations also need to determine the relevant controls on an ongoing basis, confirm those controls work, and enforce them as AI interacts with enterprise data, systems and tools.

What Trail ML Brings to Collibra

According to the announcement, 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 review evidence, determine which requirements apply, assess controls, spot 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. He said trail ML adds automation to Collibra’s context and control, and that for governance, risk and compliance teams the combination means less manual work assessing controls and maintaining evidence, along with a better way to track AI environments that change quickly. Van de Maele said the two companies together can make governance continuous and operational.

Continuous Assessment Across AI Frameworks

The companies said trail ML’s agents can examine the context around an AI system, identify the frameworks and controls that apply to it, and evaluate whether those controls are in place and effective. The announcement presents this as a way to operationalize requirements across regulations and standards including the EU AI Act, ISO 42001 and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.

Because assessments can be triggered again when supporting evidence changes, the companies said organizations can replace manual, point-in-time assessments with a governance and compliance posture that stays current as evidence evolves.

On trail ML’s website, the company describes a single platform built around two use cases. The first is AI governance for enterprises scaling AI, covering systems from machine learning models to agentic systems. The second applies AI to governance, risk and compliance work itself, with agents that automate compliance tasks across a customer’s existing tools rather than requiring teams to replace their current GRC stack. trail ML says its agents write to customer systems only when a human approves, under a mechanism it calls Copy-on-Write, and describes agent work spanning risk categorization, gap analyses, control assessments, evidence collection and report generation across business, IT security, legal, compliance, privacy and risk management teams.

The site lists integrations with tools including Confluence, Jira, GitHub, GitLab, SharePoint, Notion, ServiceNow, OneTrust, Collibra, Databricks, MLflow and Hugging Face, and says the platform can run as an EU-hosted SaaS, on-premises, or in a bring-your-own-cloud deployment on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. trail ML states that it complies with GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001 and ISO/IEC 42001, and reports 4x faster deployment of AI solutions — a figure it says is based on customer outcomes — along with 70% faster compliance execution. A banner on the homepage states that trail is now part of Collibra.

Runtime Enforcement for AI Agents

The announcement also describes runtime enforcement, stating that AI incidents increasingly start with agents taking actions rather than models giving answers. trail ML’s runtime capabilities, it said, enforce Collibra policies directly where agents run and block actions that violate those policies before they happen.

“We founded trail ML because we believe AI governance has to be automated and operational,” Spitznagel said in trail ML’s own announcement of the deal. She said that pairing trail ML’s automation and runtime capabilities with Collibra’s enterprise context, governance and reach would help organizations adopt AI more quickly, safely and at scale.

Collibra said the two companies are united by a shared mission and that the acquisition advances its vision as the enterprise AI control plane.