Zurich-based Qala Raises €1.7M To Boost Enterprise Data Governance

The round was led by QBIT Capital and Haatch, with participation from Backbone Ventures, ROI Ventures, and SICTIC 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.”

Qala AG’s pre-seed round highlights Europe’s rising interest in data observability, governance, and compliance infrastructure.

In 2025, startups across Europe—like Sweden’s Rerun, Lithuania’s nexos.ai, Germany’s Tanso, and the UK’s Cloudsmith—have raised significant rounds in related fields. While their focus areas differ, all aim to give enterprises real-time data visibility and control.

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Qala stands out as Switzerland’s key player in this emerging sector, underscoring the country’s growing presence in Europe’s data-governance landscape.

“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.”

Founded in 2024 by David Scott Turner, Carl Strempel, and Bruno Soares, Qala builds on the team’s experience in creating secure, compliant systems across regulated industries. Their previous company, Imburse Payments was acquired by a major US insurance software provider.

As organizations scale across cloud, AI, and microservice architectures, their data environments have become increasingly opaque. Qala notes that compliance and engineering teams struggle to track data movement, access permissions, and third-party dependencies—making it hard to ensure security and meet regulations like GDPR, DORA, and the EU AI Act.

Manual compliance processes can’t keep pace with fast-changing data flows, leaving gaps in visibility and governance.

“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 uses a “shift-left” approach to data compliance, offering real-time visibility, lineage tracking, classification, and policy enforcement directly at the data source. By integrating with source code, APIs, and pipelines, Qala embeds compliance into product development—without refactoring or disrupting workflows—helping teams instantly understand and govern their data.

“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