Qala AG, a Swiss startup redefining how enterprises achieve real-time data visibility and governance at source, today announces it has raised €1.7 in pre-Seed funding to accelerate product development for their source-level data observability and compliance platform.
The round was led by QBIT Capital and Haatch, with participation from Backbone Ventures, ROI Ventures and seasoned SICTIC data security and technology angels.
“AI is really forcing enterprises to better understand the data they have and rethink who is trusted with this valuable resource,” said David Scott Turner, Co-founder and CEO of Qala AG. “Governance and compliance simply can’t sit at the edge anymore, it has to be continuous and operate at source. Trustworthy software starts the moment data enters your system. Qala gives teams clarity and control they’ve never had before.”
The pre-Seed round for Qala AG reflects growing European investor focus on data observability, governance, and compliance infrastructure.
Across the continent in 2025, several startups have secured larger rounds in adjacent domains – including Sweden’s Rerun (€15.6 million Seed) for multimodal data observability in robotics and spatial AI; Lithuania’s nexos.ai (€30 million Series A) tackling AI security and governance; Germany’s Tanso (€12 million Series A) expanding its environmental-compliance platform; and the UK’s Cloudsmith (€21.9 million Series B) advancing real-time observability of software supply chains.
While these ventures differ in application, they share a common trend: enterprises seeking continuous visibility and automated control of data flows and compliance processes. Qala stands out as the only Swiss startup among them, signalling the country’s growing role in Europe’s next generation of data-governance infrastructure.
“We’ve seen firsthand how teams across engineering, security, and compliance scramble to answer the same basic questions – where data lives, how it’s protected, and who controls it,” said Carl Strempel, Co-founder of Qala. “Whether for vendor assessments or security audits, teams lose time and confidence trying to piece that picture together.”
Qala was founded in 2024 by David Scott Turner, Carl Strempel, and Bruno Soares, who have decades of experience building secure, compliant systems across highly regulated industries. Their previous venture, Imburse Payments – a global enterprise payments platform – was acquired by a leading insurance software provider based in the US.
As enterprises consume ever more data and scale across cloud architectures, microservices, and AI pipelines, their data landscape has increasingly become a black box.
According to the company, compliance and engineering teams are struggling to map the full extent of their data, pinpoint how it moves, understand who (or what) can access it, and identify where internal and third-party dependencies are creating security and compliance risks.
By the time highly manual evaluations are completed, the landscape has already changed. This lack of real-time, continuous clarity creates security risks and slows efforts to comply with critical regulations like GDPR, DORA, and the EU AI Act.
“With AI, these questions are more relevant and harder to answer than ever. Qala was built to bring that clarity continuously and automatically,” added Bruno Soares, Co-founder of Qala. “It was from these scars – and the conviction that compliance must shift left – that Qala was born”.
Qala introduces a “shift-left” model for data compliance, delivering real-time visibility, lineage, classification, and policy enforcement at the source, leading to visibility and governance directly from the source code, APIs and pipelines. Qala makes compliance inherent to product and software delivery, without refactoring or workflow disruption, allowing teams to quickly understand their data environment and enforce meaningful changes.
Benefits for compliance and engineering teams
- Live Data Mapping: real-time mapping of data flows and topologies across services and systems.
- Data Lineage: trace origins to downstream systems, understand dependencies, and evaluate impact.
- Automated Classification and Labeling: data fields are automatically detected and classified for sensitivity and regulatory frameworks.
- Policy Enforcement and Continuous Audit: apply guardrails, collect evidence and generate audit trails automatically and continuously straight from the source.
“Qala makes compliance continuous, automatic, and built into the development lifecycle, removing the lag between data creation and compliance insight. The Founders’ deep experience in regulated infrastructure, combined with the timing as data control and governance become central to AI adoption, gives them a unique advantage to define this new category,” added Basel Sbeini, General Partner at QBIT Capital
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/10/investors-back-zurich-based-qala-with-e1-7-million-to-strengthen-enterprise-data-governance-in-the-ai-era/
